Feedback by XAVIER BOUTEILLER, INRA, FRANCE

The European Meeting of PhD Students in Evolutionary Biology (EMPSEB) took place in Poland at Krasiczyn Castle from 10th to 15th September 2017.

During the meeting, PhD students in the field of Evolutionary Biology had the possibility of presenting their work and to meet their peers from all over Europe. Several invited speakers presented very interesting talks about hot topics in Evolutionary Biology. Moreover, several workshops were organized.

I would especially like to emphasise the workshop led by Dr Schinichi Nakagawa from the University of New South Wales in Australia about open and reproducible science. Dr Nakagawa insisted on the fact that many scientific studies were not reproducible; thus in order to improve the reproducibility of science he insisted on good practices in science such as blinding the experimental design, making a complete reporting preocess, pre-registering the study, self-replicating the experiments, and providing data on open center of resources. To this end, he presented the web site open science framework that is dedicated for making science more reproducible.

I also had the opportunity to present my research on the invasive tree species Robinia pseudoacacia. I’m looking for genetic differentiation on juvenile traits among invasive and native ranges to understand the introduction history of the species; moreover I am endeavouring to disentangle the role of directional evolutionary forces versus neutral forces (i.e. drift, migration, mutation) during the invasion process.

My presentation gave me the opportunity to have interesting discussions about my work with other scientists. Moreover, I had an interesting discussion with Dr Nakagawa about the analysis of my quantitative data and he presented me interesting ways for going deeper in their analysis.

I am very grateful to the EVOLTREE committee that allowed me to participate in this conference. Thanks to the EVOLTREE funding, I had the opportunity to present my work to other evolutionary biologists from all Europe and I had very interesting discussion about my project with participants that will help fulfill my PhD project.

Download my presentation abstract

Xavier Bouteiller is a PhD student at INRA BioGeCo