Transposable Elements (TEs) are everywhere! These repetitive, mobile and highly mutagenic sequences make up half of your DNA, most of the maize genome and even jump between species! That's the kind of evolutionary success I'm intrigued with. In particular (i) Investigate the TE contribution to (adaptive ?) phenotypic variation; (ii) Evaluate the importance of evolutionary forces on the evolution of TEs; (iii) Developing methods to detect, annotate and analyze the TE diversity