Since my PhD, my research has focused on my love of colours and how these have evolved in beautiful butterflies and moths. I completed my PhD at the University of Sheffield, UK, where I studied the genetic basis of structural colours in tropical Heliconius butterflies. I joined the Ecology & Evolution of Interactions group at the University of Jyväskylä for a postdoctoral position, before moving to Helsinki for an Academy of Finland postdoctoral fellowship. Now I am an Academy Research Fellow in the Department of Organismal and Evolutionary Biology. Outside of work you can find me sewing clothes, baking bread, and running (slowly) by the sea.
I'm a mountain girl that did her master's degree on a tropical island to then join a doctoral research project in a snowy but flat land, a.k.a. Finland. I guess that as long as I'm nearby nature, where I can climb, hike, run… every place fits me! Growing up in the Alps, I became amazed by the surrounding biodiversity at an early age, especially by the extremely rich but overlooked class of insects. This led me to quickly specialise in entomology, and later in evolutionary genomics, as I became fascinated by the forces and mechanisms responsible for this broad phenotypic diversity. My PhD project falls into both my passions, as I am deciphering the genetic mechanisms behind the colour polymorphism of the scarlet tiger moth (Callimorpha dominula), mixing up genomics, transcriptomics, and life-history traits to disentangle evolutionary processes.