Profile

I enjoy visiting gardens, and other natural sights. The more trees and rivers the better. There are lots of nice gardens and forests to see in Japan. They even have bears! I also play football regularly with a 6-a-side football team, and like to cook and have dinner with my friends. They are from all over the world, so have taught me lots of new recipes.

I develop mathematical models to understand how evolution works in different genetic systems. Each of us contains genes which have different inheritance patterns. For example, mitochondria (“the powerhouse of the cell”) has its own genome, but we only ever inherit this from our mothers. In contrast, for most of our genes we get one copy from our mum and one from our dad. There are very many species with very different systems to ours! Ants, wasps and bees, lay unfertilised eggs which become males, and fertilised eggs which become females. So males have only one copy of every gene, but females have two! I develop mathematical models to try and understand what the consequences of these differences will be for evolution.

In my work I’ll typically spend some time reading previous mathematical models people have created and solved. Or instead sometimes I will read papers where people have described some unusual genetics of a particular animal, plant, or fungus. I think how this information can be useful for the questions that I would like to answer. I might then spend some time trying to work out how to write equations to describe a particular process, or write some code in order to simulate that scenario. I really enjoy making figures and diagrams to describe my results. I also might spend some time writing up my results, or preparing presentations to describe them to other people.