I am an evolutionary biologist reconstructing species and population dynamics through time. I do so by integrating data and methods from different fields: ecology, archaeology, palaeoclimatology, population genetics.

Research

I am a biodiversity modeller at the Natural History Museum, London. The aim of my project is to understand how to restore tropical forests in Africa in places where they have been destroyed for mining activities.

For more than 5 years I have been a post-doc in the Evolutionary Ecology Group, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge (where I am still a visiting scientist). There, I worked on the Leverhulme-funded project “Neanderthal Palaeoecology: the whens, hows, and whys of a species’ journey“. The first outcome of this project has been pastclim, an R package to easily access and use palaeoclimatic data.

In my career, I have been working on a wide range of research questions focussing on both animals and humans. Here are a few projects I have carried out in recent years:

• Reconstruct ecological niche dynamics through time using archaeological occurrences (paper about horses, paper about ungulates)
• Species distribution modelling through time using modern occurrences (paper on birds, preprint on the yellow warbler)
• How climate and migrations impacted human genetic diversity through time (commentary on migraine, paper on Neolithic diffusion, preprint on Out of Africa, paper on Palaeolithic demography)
• Ancient DNA analysis (review about ancient DNA, paper about horses, paper about Tuscany)

Outreach

I always tried to keep the contact with the public, for example giving talks at science festivals (mostly in Italy), and doing outreach with school children. Among other activities, I have published Climate change – the board game: an educational board game about climate change and evolution, that can be freely downloaded or played online.