Academic interests
I am an evolutionary biologist using ancient and modern DNA to study evolution through space and time. My research asks how populations adapt to new environments, how demographic history shapes genetic diversity, and what genomic time series can reveal about the tempo and predictability of evolutionary change.
Much of my work focuses on two study systems. In threespine stickleback, I use subfossil bones and sedimentary ancient DNA from Norwegian isolation basins to observe freshwater adaptation as it unfolded at the end of the last glacial period. This lets me track when, and in what order, adaptive alleles rose in frequency. I also study how founder effects and regions of low recombination, such as chromosomal inversions, constrain or facilitate adaptation. In killer whales, I combine contemporary and ancient genomes to reconstruct population history and the post-glacial colonisation of high-latitude waters. I also examine the genetic consequences of small population size, including inbreeding, mutation load and purging. Across both systems, and in bottlenose dolphins, I am interested in how selection on ancestral standing variation drives the repeated formation of ecotypes.
As a member of the Sex and Evolution Research Group, I also work on the genetics of sex-specific traits, such as the evolution of menopause in killer whales, the role of the X chromosome, and sex differences in recombination.
Museum collections are central to my research. Specimens provide a temporal record of past genetic variation, so we can directly compare populations before, during and after evolutionary change. My work also contributes genomic resources for cetacean research and conservation, through reference genomes and population genomic studies of threatened killer whale populations. Beyond genomics, I am interested in the social lives of whales and dolphins, and I co-edited 'The Evolution of Cetacean Societies' (University of Chicago Press, 2026).
Background
I completed a BSc (Hons) in 'Science and the Environment' at De Montfort University in 1994. I returned to research with a part-time Masters by research at the University of Durham (2002–2005), studying killer whale vocal behaviour, and then a PhD at the University of Aberdeen (2006–2010) on the evolutionary ecology of North Atlantic killer whales.
My postdoctoral career took me across Europe. I held a Marie Curie Fellowship at the University of Copenhagen (2011–2013), where I began working with ancient DNA, followed by a Lawski Foundation Fellowship at Uppsala University (2013–2015) and a position as visiting researcher and lecturer at the University of Bern (2015–2016). I returned to the UK on a second Marie Curie Fellowship at Bangor University (2016–2019). I then moved to Norway as Associate Professor at NTNU, Trondheim (2020–2023), and as a Researcher at the Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES) University of Oslo (2023–2026), before joining the Natural History Museum, Oslo as Associate Professor in 2026.
My research has been funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant, a Research Council of Norway FRIPRO grant, the Peder Sather Program and two Marie Curie Fellowships. I have supervised or co-supervised PhD students at institutions in Europe, Australia and North America. I teach research-led courses in population genetics, ancient DNA and marine mammal genomics, including an intensive practical course on population genetics with ancient DNA data.