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.
R
Since starting my postgraduate studies in 2010 I have been interested in the R language, with increasing involvement through time. Gradually I moved beyond just doing data analysis for my own work and into a more involved commitment to research software and the #rstats community. As a certified instructor for both The Carpentries and Posit (formerly RStudio), I often teach different courses (see the R Training section of this site), while also contributing to the R ecosystem as a package developer (e.g., unheadr, annotater, forgts, hexsession, and overlay). I have participated in dev day events and translation initiatives, and since 2023 I have been a mentor in the rOpenSci Champions program. I am invested in strengthening local and global R networks, serving as an organizer for LatinR (Conferencia Latinoamericana sobre Uso de R en Investigación + Desarrollo) since 2018 and as co-Chair for Research Software Latin America 2026. I maintain a living guide to Large Language Models tool for R and regularly share my work and opinions at conferences including LatinR, useR!, and posit::conf().
Contact
Email me with any feeback about my research or this site, or for potential collaboration, or reach me through the social networks listed in the navigation pane.