Photo by: Justin Zweck
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I am happy to share that in January 2026 I will be joining the Department of Biology at the University of New Mexico as an Assistant Professor and the Museum of Southwestern Biology as the Herbarium Curator!
I am currently wrapping up my a postdoc 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 from 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. My research trajectory includes natural history, phylogenetic systematics, and ecological genomics. I aim to unravel the mechanisms of adaptation in broadly distributed plants, with an interest in understanding how life history traits shape adaptive diversity among populations. CURRICULUM VITAE |
Research Experience and 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 ecological genetics 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 role of local adaptation in the invasive spread 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 ecological genetics 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 role of local adaptation in the invasive spread 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
