A bit of info about me
I was born in the tropical lowlands of southeast Mexico, in Tuxtla Gutierrez, Chiapas. I was born and raised there until I moved to Canada at age 17. I lived there for a year and a half doing what they called OAC's (Ontario Academic Courses). Then I came back to Mexico City and started my undergraduate studies at UNAM in 2000-2001. I studied Biology and got my BSc in 2006. I entered the PhD program at the same University that same year. In 2004, I did my social service in the pacific island of Isabel, off the coast of Nayarit, Mexico, within a project related to the demography and sexual behavior of the blue footed booby under the supervision of Dr. Hugh Drummond from the Animal Behavior Lab of the Ecology Institute at UNAM. Attracted by the biogeography and ecology of mammals, I got into Hector T. Arita's lab in 2004 at UNAM. I wrote my undergrad thesis on the ecomorphology of bats from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Mexico. My doctoral dissertation investigated the inherent relationship between diversity (number of species) and distribution (species geographical distributions), trying to infer causal processes underlying this relationship. I used bats (family Phyllostomidae) as my main study group but I also applied the methodological framework developed during my PhD to inform conservation assessments for the Mexican avifauna. I'm interested on incorporating an evolutionary component to my investigations of geographical biodiversity patterns and I'm especially keen to doing collaborative work that integrates different fields of knowledge within an interdisciplinary approach to understand the mechanisms that determine the origin, maintenance and loss of biodiversity. This is what I've been doing since I came to Brazil in 2012. Currently, I'm a collaborating professor at the Universidade Federal de Goiás, where I supervise studenst and conduct research mostly on macroecology and phylogenetic comparative methods. Visit the Research tab to get more information on my research interests and approaches.