I am currently intensifying the planning and development of my intended postdoc project, with visits to two research groups in the coming few weeks. I am very happy to spend my birthday in Dominic Wright’s group at Linköping University, on May 12, and then and join the Cresko Lab with Bill Cresko, Susie Bassham, Clay Small, and Allison Fuiten at the University of Oregon in early June. We will all chat about cool future studies, making use of an organism with extreme adaptations – the pipefish – and one of the foremost biological model systems – the zebrafish.

Illustration ©: Joseph R. Tomelleri

On 18 December 2015, I finally defended my PhD thesis, entitled On Speciation in Birds – Genomic Signatures across Space and Time. (Cover artwork, the São Tomé grosbeak Neospiza concolor, by Peter Nilsson)

I was lucky enough to have Professor Trevor Price, University of Chicago, as faculty opponent, and I thoroughly enjoyed our discussions. Having written the landmark book Speciation in Birds, there is probably no single person who would be more fit as opponent. Below is a glimpse of the two of us fighting about exactly what tree topology that represent different colonization and speciation scenarios.

I currently finish some remaining work on finch radiations, while preparing postdoc grant applications. (Or perhaps you have a great project and good funding? Let me know…)

In a recently accepted paper in Molecular Ecology, we conclude that blue tits have colonised the Canary Islands from Africa no less than three times, but contrary to recent suggestions they did not back colonise mainland Africa from the islands. We combined traditional DNA sequencing on a large scale with massively parallel sequencing (“next generation sequencing”) and combine their respective strengths.

A demographic reconstruction reveals that the populations on the eastern Canary Islands Fuerteventura and Lanzarote have undergone recent population bottlenecks, while the long-term population sizes in northwest Africa have been stable, clearly supporting that the mainland populations have acted as a source for the colonisation of Fuerteventura and Lanzarote, and not the other way around.

Coalescense species trees of the Cyanistes tit complex. Values along branches represent posterior probabilities (PP), and * signifies PP = 1.0. For further information, see our paper. Illustrations (c) Martí Franch.

The phylogenetic relationships between the blue tit populations of the Canary Islands are truly intricate. Continue reading →

Looking happier than the bluebottle.

Welcome to my site! I am a keen ornithologist and evolutionary biologist, who just finished my PhD project at Lund University, Sweden, on speciation in birds. Does it seem like a rather broad theme? It is, and to cover it I am working with several study systems, of which many are made up by small radiations on isolated islands. I love doing field work, but for these projects I have spent the main part of my time in the lab, where I am applying both traditional genetic tecniques and state of the art “next generation” DNA sequencing. When asked to describe my project to non-biologists I say “think Darwin 2.0”, which should give a good hint! Read more about this in the Research section.