Jocelyn Poissant

Biography

Dr. Poissant is originally from Montréal, where he obtained a B.Sc. in Ecology at the University of Québec at Montréal in 2000. He then obtained a M.Sc. from the University of Guelph in 2004 where he studied brook trout landscape genetics and a Ph.D. from the University of Alberta in 2011 where he worked on bighorn sheep evolutionary quantitative genetics and genomics. After spending 3 years at the University of Sheffield (UK) where he worked on great tit evolutionary genetics as an NSERC and Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow, he briefly joined the University of Calgary and the HPI training program as a post-doctoral researcher in the laboratory of Dr. John Gilleard. Dr. Poissant then spent two years at the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter (UK) where he held a prestigious Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship, and ultimately returned to the University of Calgary in November 2017 as Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecosystem and Public Health.  

Dr. Poissant is an empirical evolutionary geneticist combining fieldwork with molecular and quantitative genetic approaches to understand how evolutionary forces such as natural and sexual selection interact with genetic variation to shape phenotypic diversity in wild vertebrate populations. His research focusses on a variety of wildlife species, including bighorn sheep, ground squirrels and wild (feral) horses. His main research project, conducted in close collaboration with Dr. Philip McLoughlin from the University of Saskatchewan, focuses on host-parasite, ecology and evolution in the large population of feral horses from Sable Island National Park Reserve in Nova Scotia, Canada. Specific research topics include:

• The causes and consequences of parasite resistance and tolerance in free-living populations
• Quantitative genetics and genomic basis of phenotypic variation
• Development of metabarcoding approaches for characterising mixed parasitic infections in wildlife
• Gut microbiome variation in wildlife
• Landscape and conservation genomic
• Wildlife disease ecology and epidemiology