Thanks for visiting my personal website. I am an evolutionary demographer, currently a VENI laureate at Utrecht University. My research uses demographic models to study eco-evolutionary processes and life-history evolution. Eco-evolutionary processes are fundamental to understanding human impacts on ecological communities and biodiversity decline. Evolutionary change and population dynamics are both driven by the demographic processes of birth, death, and development, and these processes provide a fundamental link between the two fields. Demography is therefore central to understanding evolution, and demographic processes are at the heart of eco-evolutionary models.

Broadly, my research program addresses two aims:

1. Adding ecological realism to evolutionary theory to address real world problems: Large swaths of life-history theory assume that populations grow or shrink exponentially, and therefore ignore ecological interactions that lead to population regulation. In de Vries, Galipaud and Kokko (2023) we show that this can lead to fundamentally flawed conclusions. My research aims to fill this gap. For example, in de Vries, Desharnais, and Caswell (2020), we combined population genetics with density-dependence and a complex life cycle to model the invasion of a pesticide resistance gene in the flour beetle Tribolium castaneum.
2. Life-history evolution in the presence of conflict (and cooperation): Conflict and cooperation are very common in the animal kingdom, and are particularly crucial in (eu)social species. Around one third of our crops depend on social insects, so understanding the eco-evolutionary forces that drive these species is crucial for our food security. However, traditional demographic methods fail when genetic conflict or behavioural conflicts are important because traditional methods assume that population-level fitness or individual fitness can be used as a fitness proxy (for more on this, see de Vries and Caswell (2019)). Therefore novel methods at the intersection of evolutionary biology and demography are needed to understand the eco-evolutionary forces shaping social insects. Understanding the consequences of deviations from optimality for life-history evolution is a crucial next step for demography, and this is a major part of my research agenda.