Science thrives in collaboration and any project of size or import is hardly imaginable without the work of multiple people. I think it is important to show the true scope of this as much as is possible and hence, I am compiling a list of the wonderful people who have enabled my work, which will only include those directly involved in scientific work.

PhD (2016-2020)

• Anna K. Lindholm was my extremely helpful supervisor who gave me this excellent PhD opportunity.
• Andrés Bendesky supervised the genomics project in my PhD at Columbia University.
• Hanna Kokko greatly supported my simulation work, which started as a side-project but needed her expert advice.
• Barbara König founded and manages the long-term house mouse study together with her research group. I am very grateful for her support.
• Heidi Tschanz-Lischer, Erik Postma, and Kentaro Shimizu were members of my PhD committee who also supported at me on various occassions.
• Rie Shimizu kindly extracted DNA for long read sequencing, which I am not trained in at all.
• Bruce Boatman is the current and likely final lab and field site manager of the barn project and a very good friend with whom I shared most of my PhD time.
• Sally Steinert and Gabriele Stichel were the predecessors responsbile for the mice in barn and lab.
• Kerel X. Francis is the lab manager at Columbia University who is being instrumental to the genomics project with his work on DNA library preparation and sequencing.
• Jari Garbely is responsible for DNA extraction and microsattelite analysis for the lab and barn project in Zurich.
• Jonas Cheung and Jasmine Klasen, MSc students, analysed the majority of the videos recorded for my exploration behavior experiment.
• Laura Lüthy and Seija Filli, MSc students, ran the pilot study for the exploration behavior experiment as part of their course work.
• David Hug, Vishvak Kannan, and Lennart Winkler, MSc students, helped me conduct my experiments in 2017.
• Aline Ullmann, MSc student, helped me during my experiments in 2018 as well as by being a great friend.