Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of Lisbon in 2007. Group leader of the Eco-evolutionary Genetics (EEG) Lab, at the  cE3c Center for Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Changes.

My background is in microbiology and genetics and, during my PhD, I studied the effects of genome structure evolution on bacterial diversification. Although the approach taken resulted in interesting explanations about the observed evolutionary patterns, it did not allow to address the processes generating those patterns nor provided a means of testing them.

Current research interests concern how species interactions influence adaptation. The EEG lab has been developing new lines of research that integrate knowledge from different fields into an evolutionary context, using C. elegans and microbes as model systems and experimental evolution as the main experimental setup. 

Our three main goals are: 

i) to understand the role of species interactions in adaptation to stressful abiotic conditions; 

ii) to find how host-microbe interactions affect the evolution of aging and which genes underlie this process; 

iii) to show how frequency- and density-dependent effects resulting from interactions between individuals affect the ecological robustness of populations.