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Dr Alex Fournier-Level
Research interests
Adaptive evolution
My group focuses on adaptive evolution, primarily in natural plant populations. We are particularly interested in adaptation to climate change and evolution of resistance to herbicide/insecticide
Research projects
- Parallel evolution: the many roads leading to Rome. A genome contains thousands of genes that can all mutate in multiple ways, but yet we observe very recurrent patterns of evolution in a handful of key genes. Using the best curated data on the genomics of life history, we are interested in studying recurrent but independent evolution so that genome-wide association can detect the extent of parallel evolution.
- From home court advantage to home court consistence.Local adaptation whereby a local strain has evolved an adaptive advantage in widespread. However, in times of uncertainty about future climates, we are interested in understanding how organisms can introduce some variation in their traits to explore different evolutionary strategy. In particular, we want to test if individuals tend to show more random trait variation when exposed to climates that are more foreign to them.