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

Research

I am a post-doc in the Evolutionary Ecology Group, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, and I work on the Leverhulme-funded project “Neanderthal Palaeoecology: the whens, hows, and whys of a species’ journey“. The first outcome of this project is 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.