Spatial Genetics
Room number: Y25 J 54
oliver.selmoni@geo.uzh.ch
Website
Oliver Selmoni is group leader of the Landscape and Climate Change Genomics group. His work focuses on measuring the impact of global change on biodiversity, so that effective mitigation strategies can be informed.
His research combines satellite observation, to assess how habitats are altered by global change, with genetic analysis of species, to uncover how ecosystems respond to these environmental pressures.
Oliver trained as a bioinformatician at University of Lausanne, where he investigated the impact of estrogen pollution on freshwater fish from Switzerland.
He then earned his PhD at EPFL in collaboration with the French Institute of Research for Development (IRD). His doctoral research examined the adaptive potential of reef-building corals in the Pacific and later the Western Indian Ocean, under the support of the United Nations Environmental and Development Programmes. During this time, he co-founded ManaCo, an international network connecting coral reef scientists and conservation practitioners. He also developed the Reef Environment Centralized Information System (RECIFS), an open access web-interface to explore global change impacts on coral reefs worldwide.
He then joined the Carnegie Institution for Science for a postdoc at Johns Hopkins and Stanford Universities, focusing on finding the genes that underlie coral adaptation to warming oceans. Coupling genomic data with climate change scenarios, he produced the first global predictions of genomic vulnerability of coral reefs against climate change.
In his current work within the Spatial Genetics unit, Oliver is contributing to the Genes from Space project, developing a framework to support genetic diversity monitoring in wild species using Earth observation data. Oliver is also investigating the effects of climate change on domesticated species, seeking genetic variants that could enhance the resilience of agricultural crops to extreme weather events.
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