I am a Full Professor at the Universidad Nacional Autonomy de Mexico. My research interests started with demography and currently at my working group we are focused on understanding phenotypic plasticity as a driver for resilience and adaptiveness to new environments. To study plasticity we have implemented experimental work using ectotherms as model species (mainly amphibians and reptiles, but also ants) to understand how they might respond to climate change and the genes associated with such responses. To do so, we are currently assembling genomes and transcriptomes of our study systems and analyzing expression profiles to link environmental cues with gene expression. At my research group we are also interested in the temporal dynamics of communities and how to model such dynamics to understand diversity on its full dimension, spatial and temporal. Finally we also work in modelling for conservation strategies using physiological tolerance and expression profiles to understand distribution shifts under global change scenarios. Our final goal is to understand how genetic expression determines individual traits, driving population dynamics, and how such dynamics will be under different scenarios, driving ultimately communitary trajectories over time.
