Sarah Kaakaï

Sarah Kaakai

ANR JCJC MATURE

MATURE — MAThematical models for UndeRstanding ageing in the wild and its Evolutionary role (2026–2030). ANR JCJC project (CE45 — Interfaces: mathematics / biology).

I am the scientific coordinator of the MATURE project.

The MATURE project is at the interface of mathematics and biology, in order to study ageing in wild populations and the role it plays in evolution. Ageing was long thought to be absent in the wild, yet recent empirical evidence shows that natural populations do contain physiologically old individuals. This raises new questions about how these individuals behave and how they shape the ecology and evolution of their population.

To explore these questions, the project builds and analyses stochastic individual-based models of age-structured populations, together with statistical methods to reconstruct their dynamics from data, in particular for Drosophila melanogaster, using the “Smurf” phenotype as an end-of-life marker. We also develop new scaling limits for age-structured population dynamics, with a particular interest in the evolutionary role of the Lansing effect.

Members and associate members

You can contact me if you are interested in this project. More information, including the launch workshop, will be added here soon.