About me

I am an applied mathematician working on adaptive dynamics, particularly on fitness-valleys, changing environments, and strategies of adaptation. I am highly interetsed in rare events, evolutionary rescue, and large population limits of stochastic individual-based models.
Currently, I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre de Mathématiques Applicées of the École polytechique in Paris, as part of the ERC SINGER project of Sylvie Méléard. Moreover, I am a member of the Chair “Modélisation Mathématique et Biodiversité” (Veolia Environment – École Polytechnique – Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle – Fondation X).
I received my PhD from the University of Bonn under the supervision of Anton Bovier.

Contact

Centre de Mathématiques Appliquées de l’École Polytechnique
Institut Polytechnique de Paris
Route de Saclay
91128 Palaiseau cedex, France
[firstname][dot][lastname]@polytechnique.edu
ORCID: 0000-0001-8670-0494

A detailed CV can be found here.

Projects

N. Champagnat and M. Esser. „Time of evolutionary branching and dynamics of separation“
M. Doumic, M. Esser, S. Kaakai and S. Méléard. „How age structured populations cross a fitness valley“

Publications

[3] M. Esser, A. Kraut. “Crossing a fitness valley in a changing environment: With and without pit stop” arXiv:2503.19766
[2] M. Esser, A. Kraut. „Effective growth rates in a periodically changing environment: From mutation to invasion“ Stochastic Process. Appl. 184, 104598 (2025) arXiv:2310.20509
[1] M. Esser, A. Kraut. „A general multi-scale description of metastable adaptive motion across fitness valleys“ J. Math. Biol. 89, 46 (2024) arXiv:2112.12675

Employment

Education

Teaching