Mugal Carina

I am an evolutionary geneticist particularly interested in understanding the molecular mechanisms and evolutionary processes that shape genetic variation within and among species. For this purpose, I use a multi-disciplinary approach spanning empirical and theoretical work within evolutionary genomics. On the empirical side, I primarily use birds and more specifically Ficedula flycatchers as a model organism, since birds show some interesting karyotype features, which make them an exciting model system in the field of genomics. On the theoretical side, I work on stochastic models solidly rooted in population genetics theory in order to improve our conceptual understanding of the genomic signatures generated by diverse evolutionary processes.

The research questions I address can be summarized into three main areas:

1) Causes and consequences of recombination rate regulation in birds

2) Speciation genomics in Ficedula flycatchers

3) A theoretical approach to the study of nonequilibrium dynamics in molecular evolution