Biography

I was born in the South of Madrid (Spain) in 1992. Since I was young, I have been interested in the natural history of species. Evolution was my passion during my entire life, and this obsession was growing year by year.

In 2010, I started my studies in Biology at King Juan Carlos University, and it was during these years that I discovered Biogeography. I fell in love with this discipline, and I wanted to know more about how the evolutionary history of organisms explains their distribution. I graduated in Biology in 2014 and obtained an extraordinary prize because of the highest grades of my promotion. The next step was my Master's Degree in Evolutionary Biology (2015-2016), in which I could start my research in island biogeography.

In 2017, I was granted an FPU (Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports) and started a doctoral thesis in the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid, under the supervision of Pablo Vargas and Mario Fernández-Mazuecos. I performed a dissertation about the colonization of oceanic islands by plant species, focusing on the Canarian archipelago, where I collected specimens from the seven main islands with Mario Fernández-Mazuecos. Finally, in 2022, I defended my thesis and obtained my Ph. D. degree.

In 2022, just when I finished my Ph. D., I started working with the Polytechnic University of Cartagena (Murcia, Spain). During this time, I have had the opportunity to work in the phylogeographic study of Cistus heterophyllus subsp. carthaginensis, the only plant species included in the List of species in a critical situation by the Spanish government.

In 2023, I was hired by the Autonomous University of Madrid as a part of the lab of Mario Fernández-Mazuecos. During this period, I worked in the Hispaphylo project, where I was focused on the study of spatial phylogenetic patterns of the complete angiosperm flora of the Iberian Peninsula.

Since 2024, I have worked as a Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow in the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, USA), under the supervision of Jun Wen. Here, I perform a biogeographic project focused on the biogeography and evolutionary history of Cissus, the largest genus of the grape family (Vitaceae). In this project, I plan to shed new light on radiation in the Neotropics and the dispersion of this genus in the Southern Hemisphere after the breakup of Gondwana.