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Hi, this is Ming, a theoretical biologist from Taiwan who is currently studying for a DPhil in Zoology at Oxford. I am interested in disentangling the complexities in the actual biological world through a range of tools like game theory models and individual-based simulations. Though consider myself a theoretician, I am keen to work on projects closely related to experimental data and happy to embrace empirical findings that do not support predictions from preexisting theories.
My PhD thesis focuses on the evolution of phenotypic diversity under the context of social evolution and environmental fluctuations. Within-species phenotypic diversity can result from collective cooperation as the division of labour, or from selfish exploitation of public goods as cheater-cooperator dynamics. In the past few years, my supervisors and I have been working on (1) Why do different species use different ways to divide labour? (e.g., random specialisation and coordination through communication); (2) Does relatedness change the best way to divide labour?; (3) Can environmental variation help maintain diversity?; (4) Why do we see genetic complications and persisting variations in the level of selfishness in a wide range of organisms?; and (5) What are the drives and conditions for temporal variations in cooperator's frequency in the population?
Besides social evolution, I have also been working on other evolutionary or ecological problems. For instance, I have a few papers on how environmental fluctuations affect the evolution of optimal clutch size, the selection for bet-hedging strategy and alternative adaptations, and the relation of temporal scales of variation to 'transient' species coexistence. In addition, there is also a paper on the number of signal types and the evolution of mimicker's signals. Some ongoing projects are about explaining the relation between thermal niche and functional trait diversity within communities, modelling cooperation under strong environmental fluctuations, and comparative studies on how climatic variables have shaped cooperation.
I use C, Python, and Mathematica for producing results; R, RMarkdown, and Illustrator for visualization. Regarding computation methods, I have been using the genetic algorithm for most projects, the standard ODE solver for population dynamics, and Gillespie's algorithm for some projects to combine equations and simulations.
(Last update: January 2023)
