Working on randomness in biological populations, funded by The Royal Society.

In 2015, Yvonne completed a BSc in Physics at the University of Münster. Fascinated by non-linear dynamics, she entered the Master’s programme in Complex Adaptive Systems at the University of Gothenburg and graduated in 2018. She developed a special interest in life science and wants to apply her maths and programming skills in an interdisciplinary environment. Thus, she devotes herself to the field of mathematical biology and currently works on population dynamics involving more than two mating types and probabilistic fitness distributions. Besides research, she likes learning new languages and enjoys outdoor activities, such as hiking, bird watching and photography, or cosy film and boardgame evenings.

Research project title:
Stochastic Mathematical Biology in Ecology and Evolution

Supervisor(s):
Tim Rogers, Ben Ashby, George Constable (external, York University)

Project description:
In this research we describe population dynamics in ecosystems and evolutionary processes through the lens of stochastic mathematical biology and develop methods to analyse phenomena that emerge from fluctuations and uncertainty. In particular, we model the dynamics of large random ecosystems in terms of randomly distributed interaction parameters and derive solutions for the power spectral density of this stochastic process based on statistical properties of the underlying interaction network.

Furthermore, we investigate the evolution of mating types in isogamous species, where the number of compatible mating types for sexual reproduction is not necessarily limited to two. Unlike in a model with neutral mutations, we find that fitness differences damp the growth of the average number of mating types and derive predictions independent of the underlying fitness distribution. This research opens up further questions on how fluctuations in ecosystems affect the evolutionary dynamics of embedded species.