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I am a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Jesse Lasky Lab at Penn State University. I finished my PhD in May 2020 at the University of Missouri - St. Louis, where I worked with Nathan Muchhala. Previously, I obtained a Masters at San Francisco State University in collaboration with the California Academy of Sciences under the mentorship of Frank Almeda. I was trained as a botanist at the Universidad del Valle, in my hometown of Cali, Colombia by Philip Silverstone-Sopkin. Being a latina woman in science always mentored by man, I have had the privilege of finding welcoming, encouraging and supporting guidance on each one of them. Thanks to that guidance my research has encompassed natural history, systematics, and molecular ecology. My research has combined field work, molecular laboratory techniques (NGS), various analytical approaches, and more recently growing plants in a common garden. CURRICULUM VITAE |
Research Interests
I am a Colombian botanist with a general interest in elucidating the mechanisms that contribute to the origin and maintenance of biodiversity in plants, and that underlie their distribution patterns at local, regional, and global scales. Being from the Andes and having come to North America has fueled my interest in understanding the factors that shape plant diversity in different regions.
My experience working in biodiversity started during my undergraduate years where I documented the reproductive biology of rare native plants from the Cauca Valley in Colombia. For my masters I studied the systematics of a clade in the highly diverse Miconia (Melastomataceae). For my PhD, I focused on population genomics of several Andean plants, and in using existing data to examine global patterns of genetic structuring across seed plants. Currently, I am studying the genomic and ecophysiological basis of local adaptation to high elevation in Arabidopsis thaliana, and the genomic basis of the biological invasion of Bromus tectorum in North America.
My experience working in biodiversity started during my undergraduate years where I documented the reproductive biology of rare native plants from the Cauca Valley in Colombia. For my masters I studied the systematics of a clade in the highly diverse Miconia (Melastomataceae). For my PhD, I focused on population genomics of several Andean plants, and in using existing data to examine global patterns of genetic structuring across seed plants. Currently, I am studying the genomic and ecophysiological basis of local adaptation to high elevation in Arabidopsis thaliana, and the genomic basis of the biological invasion of Bromus tectorum in North America.
I believe science is real, love is love, black lives matter, women's rights are human rights, no human is illegal
