Postdoctoral Research Associate working on local adaptation associated with genome rearrangements

I approach the topic of evolution from an ecological perspective. My main research interests lie in speciation with gene flow, reproductive barriers, ecological speciation and in general all that revolves around incipient species. During my PhD at the University of York I carried out an extensive macroevolutionary analysis of chemical signals in the Heliconiini tribe of neotropical butterflies. I discovered that Heliconius chemical signals show some important compositional differences from those of related genera, and demonstrated that the tribe’s chemical blends fulfil the expectations of a reproductive barrier trait, most importantly being strongly differentiated in sympatric sister species pairs.