Oscar Gaggiotti

Oscar Gaggiotti is a Professor at the Centre for Biological Diversity and the Scottish Oceans Institute in the School of Biology at the University of St Andrews (Scotland). He obtained his MSc and PhD in Ecology and Evolution from Rutgers University (USA) and his Habilitation from the University of Helsinki (Finland).

His research focuses on developing mathematical and statistical models to integrate ecology and evolutionary biology. He has made significant contributions to metapopulation biology by showing how non-equilibrium dynamics shape genetic structure and by developing Bayesian methods that combine genetic, demographic, and environmental data to identify the ecological drivers of spatial genetic variation and local adaptation. These approaches have been applied to the management and conservation of a wide range of species.

More recently, his work has expanded to explainable deep learning to address limitations of model-based inference, including model misspecification and the computational challenges posed by large-scale genomic datasets.

During his MAK’IT fellowship, he will collaborate with researchers at the Centre de Biologie pour la Gestion des Populations (INRAE) to integrate AI into statistical inference methods for analysing pangenomic polymorphisms in insect pests.