Samuel is a postdoc funded by the BAEF (Belgian American Education Foundation). He’s worked on everything from birds to parasites, always focusing on population level evolutionary relationships and the role of geographic patterns in speciation and diversification. His PhD work at the University of Brussels (Universite Libre de Bruxelles) and Meise Botanic Garden focused on comparative phylogeography of widespread tree species from the Congo Basin. For his postdoc at Cornell, Samuel will be working on the african tree species Gilbertiodendron dewevrei for which he will assess the impact of historic climatic fluctuations and forest fragmentation, estimate the time of divergence of this species from its closest relatives, and estimate dispersal distances and gene flow across it’s distribution.