I am a CNRS research director at the Institute of Biology of the Ecole Normale Supérieure. I am also associated to the SMILE group at the Collège de France. I am broadly interested in biodiversity research, and I am a TED Fellow.

Ignacio Quintero

Ignacio is a CNRS researcher in the team. He is broadly interested in studying variation in biodiversity from an evolutionary perspective. Specifically, he uses and implements phylogenetic tools, such as inference of diversification rates, trait evolution, and phylogeography, to gain a more mechanistic understanding on the origin of diversity patterns.

Joëlle is a CNRS researcher in the team. She is broadly interested in developing and implementing birth-death models for Bayesian phylogenetic inference, in order to understand better the underlying processes which give rise to phylogenetic trees. In particular, she contributes to the software frameworks BEAST2 and RevBayes. Her current research focuses on models with lineage-specific variation in birth and death rates, and their use in full phylogenetic inference.

Mathilde Scheifler

Mathilde joined the lab in September 2024 as a post-doc. Her main research interests focus on the study of microorganisms, their role in ecosystems, and host-microbe and host-parasite interactions. She is broadly interested in studying the evolutionary relationships between symbiotic communities. She uses molecular tools to explore how these symbiotic communities interact with each other and influence host physiology and metabolism, particularly in response to abiotic environmental factors.

Olivia Price

I joined the lab in October 2024 to begin my first post-doc with Ignacio. I completed my PhD at Reading University with Chris Venditti, looking at how phylogenetic comparative models and biomechanical theory can broaden our understanding of the evolution of flight in birds. My new work here aims to add to the Tapestree.jl package and focuses on understanding the interplay between species diversification and trait evolution.r

I graduated from the École Polytechnique and the EPFL, master Environmental Sciences. After a master thesis at Ifremer on fish biodiversity, I joined the lab in October 2022 for a PhD on speciation modelling, co-supervised by Hélène and Tatiana Giraud. I am interested in understanding how microevolutionary phenomena explain speciation rate heterogeneity.

Jérémy Andréoletti

Jérémy is a student from the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Masters IMaLiS at the ENS and Mathematics for Life Sciences at the Université Paris-Saclay. Interested in the evolution of biodiversity and its links with environmental drivers, he previously did an internship in the lab and is now doing a PhD on the extinction drivers of microeukaryotes, co-advised by Erin Saupe.

Minghao Du

I am a Geology PhD student from China's Central South University. I'm interested in models, Bayesian statistics, and macroevolution. I am visiting the Morlon lab for two years to conduct research on Fossilized Birth-Death (FBD) model with mass extinctions under the guidance of Joëlle.

Rosario Miranda

Rosario graduated from the Tropical Biodiversity and Ecosystems program. She is now a PhD student, co-advised by Hélène and Ben Warren at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. She is interested in studying the mechanisms that produce and maintain biodiversity. Additionally, she is fascinated by studying island biogeography from an evolutionary perspective.

Amélie Leroy

Amélie graduated from the IASD Master's program at Dauphine, ENS, and Mines ParisTech. She is now a PhD student, co-supervised by Hélène and Laurent Jacob at the LCQB (Sorbonne). Interested in the evolution of biodiversity, her research focuses on applying deep learning methods in the field, particularly to estimate phylogenetic diversification parameters.

Visitors

Mahwash Jamy

Mahwash is a postdoc fellow at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and is funded by the Swedish Research Council. She is broadly interested in studying the ecology and evolution of microbial eukaryotes using environmental sequencing data. She is visiting the lab for several months to work on environmental and biotic drivers of diversification in dinoflagellates.

Guilhem is a former postdoc from the lab. He now has a postdoc fellowship to work with Leo Lahti in the Turku Data Science Group in Finland. He visits the lab regularly.

Oscar Wrisberg

I am a PhD student from Plant Evolution and Biodiversity group at Aarhus University. I am interested in the origin of tropical rainforest plant hyperdiversity, if it differs across biogeographical realms and the possible underlying processes. I am visiting the Morlon lab for five months to further my knowledge on diversification models and how to apply them to big datasets.

Wilhelmine Bach

Wilhelmine is a PhD student at the ETH Zurich working with Loic Pellissier. She visited us to discuss her work on Gen3sis.

Wenna Ding

I am a postdoc fellow at the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL and funded by SNSF Swiss Postdoctoral Fellowship to work with Niklaus E. Zimmermann in collaboration with Hélène. I am interested in the biotic interchange among different mountain ranges in the Northern Hemisphere and how historical factors (e.g., uplift and climate changes) have affected the alpine plant diversification.

Michael Turelli

Michael spent three weeks in the lab as part of his sabbatical from the University of California, Davis.

Alfried Vogler

Alfried Vogler spent his sabbatical from Imperial College London and the Natural History Museum. He studies the phylogenetics and diversification of the Coleoptera (beetles). He is compiling an increasingly complete tree that integrates all available genome sequences, phylogenetic markers and (meta)barcoding. His visit was funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

Romain Watteaux

Romain, former postdoctoral researcher at the Statione Zoological Anton Dohrn in Napoli, spent several months in the lab. Romain studies how fluid dynamics affects growth and distribution of plankton in the oceans.

Gisela Kopp

Gisella, former postdoc fellow in the Max-Planck-Institute for Ornithologie, obtained funding to come in Paris for several visits. Gisella is interested in understanding how behaviour, such as spatio-temporal grouping patterns and dispersal, impact genetic diversity and evolutionary processes, such as local adaptation, genetic differentiation, and speciation.

Marius Somveille

Marius, forter postdoctoral fellow of the Edward Grey Institute at Oxford, visited the lab regularly. His research interests lie in understanding the processes underlying biodiversity patterns. In particular, his work focuses on the macroecology and macroevolution of bird migration.

Renske Onstein

Renske was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation to do a postdoc with Hervé Sauquet in collaboration with our group. She works on fruit trait evolution and the effects of fruit traits on diversification rates in the custard-apple family (Annonaceae).

Florian Hartig

Dr. Florian Hartig from Freiburg visited the group to work on Bayesian models as part of a Procope mobility grant.

Jessica Green

Hélène’s former post-doc advisor Jessica Green spent her sabbatical in the lab. It was great fun!

Sonia Kefi

Sonia visited the lab regularly to work on the spatial assembly of food-webs.

Brian Maitner

Brian was a PhD student in the Enquist lab at the University of Arizona. Brian is broadly interested in community assembly with a current focus on community phylogenetic patterns. Brian visited the lab as part of an exchange program between the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the University of Arizona.

Hannah Salim

Hannah was a PhD student at UC Berkeley in Matthew Potts’ group. She got awarded a prestigious Chateaubriand fellowship to visit the Lab.

Luna Sanchez Reyes

Luna was a PhD student with Susana Magallon from the University of Mexico.

Jana Smrčková

Jana was a PhD student from the University of South Bohemia.

Past members

Benoît is now an Assistant Professor at the University of Toulouse.

Viktor Senderov

Viktor is currently taking a break.

Octavio Jimenez Robles

Octavio is now a post-doctoral researcher at the Institut Natura e Teoria en Pirenèus.

Anaïs Spire

Anaïs is pursuing her curriculum at the ENS.

Fantine Bodin

Fantine is pursuing her curriculum at the ENS.

Alya Campedel

Alya is pursuing her curriculum at the Ecole Normale Supérieure

Baptiste Morillon

Baptiste is pursuing his curriculum at the Ecole Normale Supérieure

Abdelmajid Omarjee

Abdel is now doing a PhD thesis with Guillaume Achaz.

Caitlyn Jean-Baptiste

Caitlyn is pursuing her graduate studies.

Lucas Buffan

Lucas is now a PhD student with Fabien Condamine in Montpellier

Nils Chabrol

Nils is now a PhD student with Julien Clavel in Lyon, in collaboration with us.

Renan is back at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul.

Sophia Lambert

Sophia is now a post-doc at the University of Oregon with Stilianos Louca.

Mattia Tarabolo

Mattia is now doing a PhD at the University of Torino

Gabriel Sagot

Gabriel is now doing a master with Jean-Francois Le Gaillard.

Isaac is now a postdoc with Andy Rominger at the University of Maine.

Jakub Voznica

Jakub is now doing a MBA.

Loréna Duret

Loréna is now doing a master internship with Francois Blanquart at the College de France.

Thomas Merrien

Thomas is now doing a PhD in Helsinki, Finland.

Odile Maliet

Odile is now an engineer at the National Center for Spatial Studies in Toulouse.

Leandro Aristide

Leandro is now a permanent researcher at the CONICET in Argentina

Ana Silva

Ana is a now a postdoc with Camille Roux at the University of Lille.

Philippine Dubertrand

Philippine is pursuing her studies at Paris-Saclay University.

Benoit Pichon

Benoit is now pursuing the master IMaLiS from the ENS.

Nathan Gil

Nathan is now doing his second year of master in ecology and evolution at the University of Montpellier.

Rémy Le Goff

Rémy is now doing a Master with Fabien Leprieur at the University of Montpellier.

Carmelo Fruciano

Carmelo is now a permanent researcher at the National Research Council in Messina, Sicily.

Nina Vittorelli

Nina pursues her studies at the Ecole Normale Supérieure.

Marc Manceau

Marc is now a postdoctoral researcher with Tanja Stadler.

Julien Clavel

Julien is now a CNRS researcher in Lyon.

Eric Lewitus

Eric is now a Bioinformatics Analyst at the Walter Reed Institute of Research.

Olivier Missa

Olivier has moved to Papua New Guinea.

Margaux Bieuville

Margaux is pursuing her Erasmus Mundus program in evolutionary biology (MEME).

Renske Gudde

Renske has now moved to Germany.

Samuel Delbecq

César Martinez

César is now a PhD student in Montpellier

Jonathan Drury

J.P. is an assistant professor at Durham University.

Linh-Phuong Nguyen

Phuong is now a postdoctoral researcher at the iEES in Paris.

Olivier Billaud

Olivier is now doing a PhD at the MNHN in Paris.

Jonathan Rolland

Jonathan is now a CNRS researcher in Toulouse.

Pierre-Henri Fabre

Pierre-Henri is now an assistant professor in Montpellier.

Dan Moen

Dan is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at Oklahoma State University.

Fabien Condamine

Fabien is now a CNRS researcher in Montpellier.

Victoria Culshaw

Viky is now doing a PhD with Isabel Sanmartin.

Mircea Sofonea

Mircea is now an assistant professor at the MIVEGEC in Montpellier

Elisabeth Reyes

After a master with us, Elisabeth did a PhD with Hervé Sauquet at the University of Orsay.

Lucile Morelle

Lucile is now a lecturer in mathematics

Prince Peprah Osei

After his internship with us, Prince pursued his Erasmus Mundus Complex Systems master program at the Ecole Polytechnique.