Nice, to meet you!

As part of my thesis for Biology at the National University of Colombia, I started my career working on drift algae and their taxonomy. Then I joined Manihot Biotec, lab specialized in plant immunity. There, I learned about bioinformatics, genome annotation, molecular modelling, and phylogenetics.

For my Masters degree in Molecular Biology at the University of Wyoming, I wrote my first program, which was used to analyze how the intrinsic protein disorder in flavivirus proteins has a clear phylogenetic signal.

In my PhD for Biological Sciences at the Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt University, I studied how clusters of gene duplicates evolved in the mammalian phylogeny, and the different ways in which gene clusters improve molecular diversity, with a specific interest in the evolution of pregnancy and its implications in studying preterm birth in humans. (and taught taught classes on Latin American food at the University)

In my postdoc I moved to the RIKEN institute in Japan. At the Laboratory for Phyloinformatics at the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research I developed computational tools to study the evolution of gene families in sharks, a basal. Then, as an SPDR recipient, I worked in the Laboratory for Advanced genomics Circuit at the Center for Integrative Medical Sciences at RIKEN, I developed data analysis and visualization applications to study chromatin dynamics in an evolutionary context.