Since my youngest age, my fascination for reptiles has only been growing and this passion has led me to study evolutionary biology/ecology and its underlying mechanisms using reptiles as model organisms. Given my background and interests, it is only naturally that I became a Ph.D. student at the Lizard Lab at Macquarie University (Sydney), after obtaining a scholarship in 2014.
My project delves into the evolution of colour signals in lizards, and is co-supervised by Martin Whiting (Macquarie University, Sydney) and Pau Carazo (Cavanilles Institute of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology, University of Valencia). I will address general questions about animal communication such as 1) What makes signals reliable enough to be evolutionarily stable in the face of deception?, 2) What is the role of structural and pigment-based coloration in animal signalling?, 3) What evolutionary pressures shape colour patterns in different parts of an animal?. To answer these questions, I will study adaptive co-variation across and between lizards colour patterns/signals in relation to socio-ecological factors (e.g. mating system, environmental conditions) and individual traits (e.g. age, sex, size, competitive ability, health or social status). I will pay particular attention to the social and ecological factors affecting the evolution of signal reliability, and whether different colour-producing mechanisms place different constraints on the evolution of chromatic signal honesty and reliability. My research will focus on the European Podarcis lizards, also know as wall lizards, which are ideally suited to study these questions. Besides, I will have the chance to visit many localities across the Mediterranean region, including several islands during my fieldwork.
I obtained my BSc at the University of Bordeaux (France) in 2011, and I graduated from my MSc at the Pierre et Marie Curie University, Paris (France) in 2013. I also worked some time as a high-school teacher in Earth and Life Sciences in France.
