I am an evolutionary ecologist who seeks to understand microbial life, what are the ecological and evolutionary factors that shape microbial populations, as well as understanding the dynamics of their genomes in the light of evolution.

I’m currently an associate professor at the UNAM Institute of Marine and Limnology Sciences, where I study the microbial life of the ocean. My work explores questions about biogeography, evolution, ecology, and physiology of microorganisms. I use computational and experimental approaches to answer these questions and my main interest is to understand the factors that determine the distribution of microbial species in the ocean, what are the genomic bases of adaptation leading to speciation, what is their role in the Earth’s biogeochemistry and how they interact with other organisms within the ecosystem.

I did my PhD at the Institute of Ecology UNAM, where I studied the evolution of bacteria using comparative and population genomics. For this research, I isolated bacteria from the pools of Cuatro Ciénegas and looked for genes associated with local adaptation. During my first postdoc, I studied the interaction between plants, insects and microbes, using transcriptomic tools and 16s RNA amplicone libraries.

During my postdoc at the microbial ecology lab at the University of Texas at Austin, my research focused on the discovery of new lineages and metabolic pathways of ocean microorganisms through the reconstruction of genomes obtained with metagenomics.

I like the R community, I am co-organizer of R-Ladies Xalapa and San Cristobal, and also part of the board team of the Community of Software Developers in Bioinformatics (CDSB). Currently, I am working on my first R package called Rbims that it’s focused on the analysis of metabolism.