BACKGROUND:

I have always loved nature and have wanted to be a biologist since I discovered you could do that for a living. My love of nature and traveling back and forth between the United States (where I was born) and Ecuador (where my family is from) have enormously influenced my life.

My training in biology is quite diverse. I obtained my undergraduate degree in Biology at the University of Guayaquil in Ecuador and lived there between 1990 and 1996. I then moved back to the United States for graduate school and got my M.S. at the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory which is part of the University of Southern Mississippi. I worked with Stuart Poss studying Cynoscion otolith morphology and evolution. From there I went on to get my Ph.D. at the State University of New York at Stony Brook working with Michael A. Bell studying the evolutionary diversification of Alaskan threespine stickleback. Below I go into a bit more detail into each of these experiences.

B.S. at University of Guayaquil, Ecuador
M.S. at Gulf Coast Research Laboratory
Ph.D. at SUNY Stony Brook

Studying biology in Ecuador was amazing. Ecuador is such a biologically rich country, I can't imagine a better place to have gotten my undergraduate degree. I attended Biology School at the University of Guayaquil where my training was strong in natural history. Except for the first year, all the classes I took over the five year program were biology classes which gave me a very strong background. My professors emphasized understanding diversity and we learned about the animals and plants living around us, where they could be found, how they were related, what they did, etc. I was also very active in research and volunteered with the University's Natural History Museum, the Ecuadorian Foundation for the Study of Marine Mammals (FEMM), and with NyMA (Ninos y Medio Ambiente), a private non-profit children's foundation, among others. The years I spent as an undergraduate in Biology were among the most formative and important in my life. I had a hard time figuring out who I was as a teenager and the son of immigrants traveling back and forth between continents. I finally "found" myself (and my calling) while at the University of Guayaquil.

Gulf Coast Research Laboratory - Becoming a Profesional Biologist While Studying Sciaenids (1997-2000)

After getting my undergrad degree I spent a couple of months as a farm intern at Green Chimneys, another children's organization located in Brewster, NY that aimed to help troubled kids from New York City. I had come back to the US in May of 1996 to begin the internship and naivly assumed that I would have plenty of time to apply for graduate school and begin in August (of the same year!). Of course you have to apply around January to start in August, so I spent the rest of the year taking classes as a non-degree student at the University of South Florida in Tampa and applying for grad school.

In August of 1997, I began in the M.S. program at the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory working with Stuart Poss, who was then curator of the GCRL Museum. I was a research assistant compiling bibliographical information on the natural history of non-indigenous species in the Gulf of Mexico Ecosystem for a web page on the subject that Dr. Poss created (a modified version of the page is still available at: http://nis.gsmfc.org/). However my M.S. thesis was on morphological variation and evolution of species in the Cynoscion group, especially of otolith morphology. Cynoscion and related genera (Isopisthus, Macrodon) are commonly known as weakfish, seatrout, or corvinas and are in the family Sciaenidae. I quickly became fascinated with sciaenids and created a web page on them (click here for a link). I also published a couple of papers from my Master's thesis (see my Publications page) but am embarassed to say that a lot of data from that work remains unpublished. Hopefully one day I will get it out.

It was at GCRL that I became a professional biologist. I learned how to search the literature, about the importance of publishing and applying for grants, how to write in a scientific format, and basic methods in molecular biology and morphometrics.

SUNY Stony Brook - Insights Into Evolution From Alaskan Threespine Stickleback (2000-2007)

I began in the Ph.D. program at Stony Brook in August of 2000. There, I had the chance to study the factors that facilitate and constrain the evolution of biological diversity. Michael A. Bell was my Ph.D. advisor and my dissertation addressed contemporary evolution and the interaction between gene flow and natural selection in Alaskan threespine stickleback, Gasterosteus aculeatus. Stickleback are one of the hottest systems in evolutionary biology at the moment. They exhibit tremendous morphological variation, are capable of adapting rapidly to novel environmental stimuli, are easy to keep in the lab, and are small in size and common where they occur facilitating their collection and storage. There is an enormous literature on stickleback ecology and evolution including several texts. Their genome was also recently sequenced and QTL analyses are identifying adaptively important genes related to armor structures. In short, they have numerous qualities that make them a great system with which to study evolution.

My research on threespine stickleback continues. To read more about it, please go to my Projects web page.