We are living in times where the world is changing fast – and into unprecedented conditions. Such global change requires mechanistic models to predict impacts on the natural world. However, prospects may not always be bleak, given the many examples reported nowadays of fast change triggering rapid evolution and behavioural change that facilitate persistence of populations and species.

For me, the main challenge is to understand these dynamics by developing mechanistic models that incorporate the feedback between ecology and evolution (eco-evolutionary dynamics). Because I am convinced that adaptive behaviour typically links ecological and evolutionary dynamics, my research revolves around evolution and behaviour. I focus on studying polymorphic traits, such as alternative reproductive tactics, and social behaviour, such as reciprocal helping and altruism. With polymorphisms it is easier to measure eco-evolutionary feedback in a shift in the ratio of morphs than by measuring fitness and changes in phenotype distributions. And whenever we study social behaviour – especially in humans – we also find that multiple strategies coexist. But theory so far focused on conditions where one strategy would dominate. Clearly, there is a new challenge for theory to explain the empirical findings, to which I hope to contribute.

My expertise in behavioural biology, adaptive dynamics theory, and experimental evolution with mites has led to many collaborative projects. I am a “ team player” and enjoy being involved in a variety of research projects through these collaborations. Two examples are NWA-funded projects, one on “Predicting Evolution” and another on predicting changes in microbiomes in mouth and guts of humans in their first 1000 days of life (within the consortium “Metahealth”).

Since the COVID pandemic unfolded, I started a new collaborative research group with international colleagues, within the theme “Predicting Evolution”, on the evolution of the genetic code (with Astrid Groot (UvA), Peter van der Gulik (CWI Amsterdam), Ken Kraaijeveld (Applied University Leiden), Wouter Hoff ((Oklahoma State University, USA), and Jenna Gallie (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön, Germany)). We have been working online, meeting once per week, on bio-informatic “big-data” analysis of available genome data, in order to study variation in the use of tRNA gene repertoires within and among the three domains of life. We started by focusing on the variation in tRNA repertoire of Archaea, figuring out not only which tRNAs are mandatory for a functioning organism and which are auxiliary, but also why some taxa lost many auxiliary tRNA genes and others did not.