Biography: Amandine is a morphologist and evolutionary biologist with a peculiar interest in marine organisms. She gained her BSc and MSc in Biological Sciences at the University of Liège, Belgium, and conducted her Master’s thesis on the comparative morphology of cephalic cartilage in cephalopods at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Spain. After gaining experience in the field as a research assistant for projects studying wild dolphin populations, she came back to Belgium to pursue her Ph.D. at the Laboratory of Functional and Evolutionary Morphology at the University of Liège. Her project focused on understanding how morphological modifications of the backbone of cetaceans are related to their ecology and evolutionary history by combining morphometrics, biomechanics, kinematics and phylogenetic comparative methods. Amandine joined the Pierce lab in order to investigate how repeated invasions of the aquatic realm affected the form and function of the mammalian backbone in collaboration with Katrina Jones (The University of Manchester). This project will involve morphological and biomechanical data on terrestrial, semi-aquatic and fully aquatic extant and extinct mammals in order to clarify the impact of the land-to-water transition on the axial skeleton at a broad comparative level.