Nicolas Chazot

I was born in France and pursued my university education across Clermont-Ferrand, Rennes, and Paris. I defended my PhD in 2014 at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris on the diversity and biogeography of Neotropical butterflies, focusing on two iconic groups: the Ithomiini and the Morphos. I conducted an additional one year project at the Museum as an Attaché Temporaire d'Enseignement et de Recherche (A.T.E.R.) before joining Niklas Wahlberg research group at Lund University in Sweden in 2016 as a post-doc. In 2018, I moved to the University of Gothenburg to work with Alexandre Antonelli and Christine Bacon. And in 2020 I was hired as an Associate Senior Lecturer at SLU, Uppsala, before becoming a Senior Lecturer in 2024.

My main interest lies in exploring the ecological and evolutionary processes that operate at the scale of communities and ecosystems. I am using a wide range of data – from DNA, phenotypes, fossil record, species distributions, and ecological information such as mimetic interactions, virus interactions, host-plant interactions – and a diversity of tools, combining phylogenetics, biogeography, geometric morphometrics, community ecology, comparative analyses and metabarcoding.

I have primarily worked on butterflies, with a strong focus on tropical biodiversity and biogeography. But more recently, I am particularly interested in using insect metabarcoding for studying global insect biodiversity. Metabarcoding of insect bulk samples generates vast amounts of DNA information, which provides a unique peek into insect biodiversity. I am mainly interested in integrating these DNA barcodes within a phylogenetic framework to improve species discovery and expanding our understanding of the Insect Tree of Life.

Since 2024 I am also leading a project on networks of insect-virus interactions in collaboration with virus epidemiologists. We are sequencing individual butterfly metatranscriptomes - i.e. all RNA contained in an individual - from which we can identify RNA viruses carried by these butterflies. By scaling up these analyses to multiple communities of butterflies we want to understand how these networks of interactions are structured across species and communites in natural ecosystems. 

I am course leader for the undergraduate course Bi1251 Organismvärlden where I also teach two modules : "Evolution" and "Zoology".

I am also teaching the "Conservation Genetics" module in the bi-annual course Bi1378 Forest Conservation Biology at Master level.