The PI, Roberto Feuda, PhD, Royal Society University Research Fellow and Associate Professor

I earned my PhD in Biology and Bioinformatics from the University of Ireland, Maynooth, in 2013 under the supervision of Prof. Davide Pisani. My doctoral work focused on the evolutionary origins of opsins and the relationships between non-bilaterian animal lineages.

After a short postdoc in Prof. Peter Holland’s lab at the University of Oxford, where I studied opsin evolution in insects, I moved to the California Institute of Technology to join Prof. Eric Davidson’s lab. There, I shifted my focus to developmental biology and began working on the evolution of gene regulatory networks.

In 2018, I was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, which enabled me to return to Europe to establish my independent research group. My work integrates evolutionary genomics, developmental biology, and single-cell genomics. I’m particularly interested in the evolution of cell types and how gene regulatory networks shape animal diversity. 

Here is the video of my talk for the Caltech postdoc symposium, scheduled immediately after presentations by Walter Gehring and Eric Davidson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdZJTmHO4is&t=4268s.  (As you can imagine, I was completely calm and not at all sweating through my shirt).