Skills

I have worked on a range of topics in evolutionary genetics, but a common theme is investigating the link between genes and their environments in the relevant biological context.

I would highlight four key areas of expertise I have gained:

Data analysis

• I have more than 10 years experience of using R and Python for data analysis almost every day, including interacting with both Git and high performance computing clusters.
• The work I have most enjoyed has been those where conventional approaches run into difficulty, and the way forward has come by approaching the problem from a different angle. For example:
  • Speeding up paternity inference
  • Taking a quantitative, rather than categorical, approach to investigating pleiotopy
• A strong focus on robust, reproducible code. See for example:
  • Code repositories accompanying publications on fitness components or virus resistance Arabidopsis thaliana.
  • The R and Python packages I have written to support my research.

Large-scale field experiments

• I have gained ample experience of planning, carrying out and harvesting large-scale field experiments.
  • During my PhD I was involved and occasionally led a demographic survey of thousands of wild snapdragons
  • I designed and led a large-scale pollination assay in the field.
  • During my post-doctoral work on local adaptation in Arabidopsis thaliana I was responsible for organising six reciprocal transpant experiments involving hundreds of thousands of plants in two countries.
• Key to this is an emphasis on careful experimental design:
  • In my current position investigating methylation variation we suspected that there was cryptic confounding affecting our bisulphite sequencing data. Thanks to careful blocking and randomisation I was able to isolate the problem and refine subsequent data collection.

Leadership and mentoring

• I have organised and led teams of volunteers in data collection for multiple large field experiments to strict deadlines.
• I have initiated and led the organisation of three IST Austria PhD Symposia, as well as networking meetings for the Vienna evolutionary biology community.
• I have assisted in the supervision of several PhD students in conjunction with principal investigators.

Clear communication

I take great satisfaction in presenting complex ideas clearly to non-experts:

• Winner of the Vienna “Science Slam” 2013, presenting my research to the public.
• Winner of the IST Austria “Best talk” for the internal seminar series 2014 for mixed audience of scientists.
• My PhD thesis was nominated for “best thesis” in 2016