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I've moved; right now I'm doing a postdoc at the Oxford University, the
mathematical biology group in the Zoology department. I'm working on the
evolution of redundancy in a fungal genetic system
which regulates self-nonself recognition. These systems
have characteristics in common with other
self-nonself recognition systems, e.g., mating systems in plants and
MHC molecules in the adaptive immune system. I'm studying
self-nonself recognition sytems in fungi as a paradigm for the evolution
of redundancy in systems where redundancy influences the
interaction between systems and its evolution
is strongly shaped by the nature of the interaction of the organism with other
organisms. A typical example is the redundancy which abounds in the immune
system, where the immune system interacts, and coevolves, with pathogens.
Of course, in a broader context the same issues come about in economic
markets when competitive agents evolve in a interactive environment.
I did my PhD studies under supervision of Prof. Paulien Hogeweg in the Theoretical Biology/Bioinformatics group, Utrecht University, Holland. My PhD thesis is available online below.
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Here, in the EvCA group, I focus on coevolution in the context of evolutionary optimization models. Although some studies have shown that coevolution may enhance the optimization process, other studies have shown that coevolution may lead to outcomes (e.g. red queen dynamics, or speciation) that are far from desirable from the point of view of finding optimal individuals. One aspect that seems to be important in coevolutionary optimization (and maybe even more so that in standard evolutionary optimization) is the degree that the populations are divers. I study how diversity arises, how it is maintained in the population and how it influences the evolutionary dynamics.