Felix Hol

Hi everybody! My name is Felix Hol. I am a PhD student in the labs of Juan Keymer and Cees Dekker at Delft university of technology (the Netherlands).

Main Interests

Among many other things, I am interested in and currently work on the role the spatial distribution of populations has on determining evolutionary computation in two separate systems: (1) metapopulations of bacteria adapting to dynamic landscapes of antibiotic challenges, and (2) metapopulations of genetic algorithms adapting to perform a classification task.

In my experimental work with bacteria, I observe metapopulations adapting on-chip1 to temporal and spatial fluctuations of antibiotics; I compare the behavior of a single, monolithic population in a single homogeneous habitat versus a spatially structured heterogeneous metapopulation. I compare them in terms of their adaptability to the landscape, their robustness, and the rate at which evolutionary innovation confers antibiotic resistance on the cells.

In the computational part of this work I implement genetic algorithms with different population structures (monolithic and distributed metapopulations) to evolve cellular automata task-performing rules.