About me
This site
Welcome to my personal research page. I’ll be using this site for news, updates on research articles, R code, and blog posts. The layout and design are a work in progress, as I slowly learn more about Git, Markdown and Jekyll. I often share the R-related posts on R Weekly.
Research
I’m interested in mammalian diversity. Through my research I aim to identify the mechanisms that generate spatial and taxonomic patterns of diversity, and the processes that threaten it. My broader interests include ecomorphology, mammalian evolution, biogeography, small mammals, and phylogenetic comparative methods.
From July 2015 until October 2016 I was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Vertebrates Department at the Natural History Musem Bern. My project involved relating ecology to morphology to phylogeny in rodents using museum collections and phylogenies. After that (2017-2020) I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Instituto de Ciencias Ambientales y Evolutivas, Universidad Austral de Chile. My research project investigated the ecomorphological evolution of South American rodents. After a stint working as a freelance R and Shiny programmer for various projects, I undertook a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Evolutionary Macroecology Lab (INECOL, Mexico, 2021-2023) where I now work doing biodiversity data science full time.
Background
I am a mammalogist by training. For my PhD (University of Queensland: 2010-2014), I investigated the relationship between phylogeny and extinction risk in mammals. This research explored how the evolutionary age of a lineage relates to its current extinction risk (it doesn’t) and the effects of extinctions on phylogenetic diversity and tree topologies. Before that, I studied the ecology of bat migration for my BSc research thesis as part of a biology degree at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM; 2004-2009). I also like avian macroevolution and birding.
Contact
Email me with any feeback about my research or this site, or for potential collaboration. Find me on Twitter by clicking on the bird icon in the navigation pane.