I am interested in understanding the determinants of fitness in natural populations. My view is that this question can only be addressed by understanding how the within-organism and population levels of biological organization interact. This implies understanding the effects of genetics, physiology, morphology and behaviour on each other, how they interact to determine individual fitness and how these different individual phenotypes translate into population growth rate, taking also the role of broad-sense environmental variation into account. This approach should enable us to better understand micro-evolutionary processes and also to address conservation questions helping minimize extinction risk. My current interest is focused in understanding the links between micro-evolutionary and ecological processes using the wood mouse. I conduct this research under a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowship in Coulson’s lab.

The overall objective of this study is to investigate the links between the dynamics of phenotypic traits and population dynamics and how they are affected by selection and the environmental variation. This would be a major advance as it would link phenotypic traits that are the focus of selection and variation in birth and death rates that are typically considered to be influenced by environmental variation. Small rodents like these are an ideal system in which to investigate eco-evolutionary dynamics because they have fast generation times and show dramatic fluctuations in population size. They also have small home ranges and live at high densities.