Jean Vila

Jean (They/Them) is a CEHG Postdoctoral Fellow in the Petrov Lab (2022-now). Their research seeks to understand how the environments microbial communities occupy and construct quantitatively predict their evolution. During their PhD with Alvaro Sanchez at Yale they studied the evolutionary ecology of microbial niche construction, combining experiments with computational models of microbial metabolism and consumer-resource dynamics. This led to work on a broad range of topics including eco-evolutionary dynamics and fitness landscapes, microbial community assembly in simple environments, and evolutionary engineering of microbial consortia. Following on from this work during their post-doc they are exploring the impact of species interactions on the structure of fitness landscapes and the predictability of evolution. They are working with the multi-species yeast communities involved in wine fermentation exploring how yeast evolution is mediated by its interaction with other fungal species.