Short biography
I was born in 1973 in La Garriga, Barcelona. I graduated in Biochemistry (Award with Special Distinction), at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Bellaterra, Spain, in 1996. I obtained my PhD (Award with Special Distinction), in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at UAB, in 2001. After I shifted to the study of butterflies as a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow, in the Dept. of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA, during 2002-04. My stage at Harvard was extended for one more year (2005) as Postdoctoral Fellow at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. I have been ICREA Researcher from 2006 to 2011, first at the UAB and after at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (CSIC-UPF), Barcelona, Spain. Currently I am a CSIC researcher at IBE (CSIC-UPF), where I have created the "Butterfly Diversity and Evolution Lab".
Research interests
Butterflies are my life-long passion. I study them by using a combination of morphological, cytological and molecular techniques. I am mostly interested on their evolution and diversification, and I construct phylogenies to know how they are related and what their history is. With these techniques I can discover, for example, when and following what route a group of tiny butterflies colonized the New World, how parasitism evolved from a friendly association between species, or if a given population constitutes a new species worth protecting. Key words
Evolution, phylogeny, biogeography, systematics, Lepidoptera, Insecta
