Joëlle Barido-Sottani has been a PhD student in the Computational Evolution group at ETH Zurich since October 2014. She obtained an MSc degree in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics from ETH Zurich and University of Zurich in 2014. Her current research focuses on developing a multi-states birth-death model with an unknown number of states, and implementing it in BEAST2. She is generally interested in the mathematical and computational modelling of complex evolutionary processes, particularly when different populations with different evolutionary characteristics are involved.