Research and Personal Interests

I'm a PhD-student with Peter Hammerstein at Humboldt-University's Institute for Theoretical Biology (ITB) and additional supervision from Olof Leimar at Stockholms Universitet, Sweden. My thesis-work deals with Darwinian decision making in ovipositing insects---how do insects decide where to lay their eggs, what are optimal optimal decision strategies of host plant choice, and how are these strategies shaped by environmental, developmental, and cognitive factors.

I am also interested in many other evolutionary and ecological topics ranging from host-parasite co-evolution to human decision making, evolutionary game theory, invasion ecology, and also more "classical" behavioral ecology. In the past, I have worked on invasion ecology (with Arndt Telschow and Michio Kondoh) as well as on host-parasite coevolution and the intracellular parasite Wolbachia (with John H. Werren, Peter Hammerstein, Arndt Telschow, as well as with Benjamin Bossan and Peter Hammerstein). I have also worked empirically on subspeciation genetics in the willow warbler (Phylloscopus trochilus) with Staffan Bensch in Lund University's Molecular Population Biology Lab. Moreover, I like to explore the interface of biology and philosophy as well as the history of biology and, as a result, have co-founded and co-organise the Journal Club Evolutionary Biology together with Victor Anaya.

Besides theoretical biology, another scientific interest of mine is conservation. Recently, I was lucky to be able to spend six insightful months in Phnom Penh, where I worked as an intern with WWF-Cambodia performing both research- and communication-tasks. Among other things, I conducted a field study on the drying-out dynamics of waterholes in northeastern Cambodia's pristine dry forests as well as restructured WWF-Cambodia's website. My stay in Cambodia was funded by the Carlo-Schmid-Programme, a joint initiative of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung).

In my freetime, I listen to and make music (see here and here), watch birds, take photos, like to travel, and occasionally play team sports, currently mostly basketball with our newly established ITB-team.

Teaching

I currently teach tutorials, seminars, and practice sessions in Evolutionary Biology for bachelor- and master-students. I have co-supervised thesis work by three diploma- and one bachelor-student on Wolbachia- as well as Ageing-related theoretical questions. In the past, I have taught tutorials and practice sessions in Evolution, Theoretical Biology, Evolutionary Game Theory and Evolutionary Genetics, as well as in Programming in C++. Recently, I completed an eight-month training-course at Berlin's Technical University (Link in German) to learn new skills in online teaching.

CV

You can download a pdf-version of my CV here.

Publications

Koehncke A, Telschow A, Kondoh M (2012) Invasibility as an emergent property of native metapopulation structure. Oikos: In press.

Bossan B, Koehncke A, Hammerstein P (2011) A new model and method for understanding Wolbachia-induced cytoplasmic incompatibility. PLoS ONE 6(5): e19757. Link.

Koehncke A, Telschow A, Werren JH, Hammerstein P (2009) Life and Death of an Influential Passenger: Wolbachia and the Evolution of CI-Modifiers by Their Hosts. PLoS ONE 4(2): e4425. Link.

Posters

Koehncke A, Leimar O, Hammerstein P (2011) The challenges of optimal oviposition - Ecological and developmental constraints, Poster at the Entomology Congress 2011 of the German Society for General and Applied Entomology (DGaaE) in Berlin. Link.

Koehncke A, Kondoh M, Telschow A (2007) Boom-and-bust patterns in models with spatially explicit structure, Poster at the 2nd International Symposium on Dynamical Systems Theory and Its Applications to Biology and Environmental Sciences in Shizuoka, Japan. Link.