Master's defense

This morning, Laetitia Carrive brillantly defended her master's thesis in Paris. Her master's project focussed on the evolution of the perianth in Magnoliidae, combining detailed morphological observations with micro-CT scanning on selected species (in collaboration with Jürg Schönenberger and Yannick Staedler at the University of Vienna) and phylogenetic comparative analyses using state-of-the-art approaches (incl. reversible-jump Markov Chain Monte Carlo) to characterize trait evolution and correlation. Her main result is that perianth phyllotaxy and fusion appear to be correlated in Magnoliidae.