"Since Darwin suggested that the cradle of flowering plants was found in an isolated southern continent now vanished, the spatial aspect of their origin has been neglected. In this project conducted with the support of Dr F. Forest from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (UK), the applicant wish to address the following questions pertaining to the spatial origin of angiosperms: 1) Was the proto-South-East (SE) Asian continent, formed by landmasses that rifted from the southern Gondwana during the Paleozoic-Mesozoic, the birthplace of angiosperms?; 2) Has SE Asia acted as a centre of diversification for many angiosperm families through time?; 3) Has SE Asia been an important source of dispersal into other geographic regions?; and 4) How different dispersal modes will affect the ability of taxa to colonize other geographic regions and the resulting biogeographic patterns? To investigate these issues, the innovative full Bayesian framework approach (that simultaneously integrates phylogenetic, dating and biogeographic inferences) will be applied to DNA-sequence datasets compiled for several families from published and newly produced data. This project will also contribute to the development of novel biogeographic methods by providing a protocol to integrate paleogeographic connections through times and estimate specific dispersal rates per lineage. This will be implemented in MrBayes 4.0 with the collaboration of Prof. I. Sanmartin (Spain) and Prof. F. Ronquist (Sweden). Through this project, the applicant will have the opportunity to develop his skills in many aspects of biology and bioinformatics, which will provide him with the necessary expertise and experience to become one of the leaders in this field in Europe. Moreover, his immersion in an extremely active research environment at Kew and the establishment of links with other institutions will strengthen the applicant’s network and increase his potential to reach a position of professional maturity."