Research

Rocks under our feet are an archive of information on evolutionary and environment changes that span timescales we cannot observe today. If we could tap into the rich history of the Earth preserved in rocks and fossils, we could put today's environmental challenges, biodiversity and even ourselves in a context and understand where it comes form. I "translate" the Earth history to today's processes and vice versa, focusing on the interaction between the physical rock record and evolutionary processes.

I am a paleobiologist, specializing in the new field of stratigraphic palaeobiology. My research investigates how the physical structure of the geological record and processes such as sediment transport, erosion, ecological interactions, affect the preservation of fossils and the patterns we reconstruct from them. In my PhD, demonstrated that several extinction events were artefacts best explained by the physical structure of the geological record. I focus on carbonate environments, because they are biodiversity hotspots and are direct results of interactions between sedimentation and evolution. My reconstructions of evolutionary patterns usually rely on microfossils, such as conodonts. A lot of my work involves development of Open Source research software, for example the stratigraphic forward model for carbonate environments, CarboKitten.jl.

Currently I lead a project funded by the European Research Council, MindTheGap: Quantifying the completeness of the stratigraphic record and its role in reconstructing the tempo and mode of evolution.