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Biography
l completed my Baccalaureate and Licenciature degrees in Biology at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia and the International Potato Center in Lima Peru. I then moved to Miami, U.S.A. to pursue my PhD in Biology at Florida International University. I worked as a Plant Ecologist at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden U.S.A. until 2007 and as a post-doc at Aarhus University in Denmark until 2009. I obtained a Marie Curie Intraeuropean Fellowship award to conduct research at the Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement in France until 2012. I finally settled in Canada where I joined Memorial University of Newfoundland as an assistant professor in May 2013.
My research focuses on understanding the patterns and processes underlying the evolution of the high plant species richness in tropical America. To achieve this goal I use fossil-calibrated molecular phylogenies, species distributions, phylogenetic comparative methods and biogeographic modeling. I use species-level phylogenies within the palm family (Arecaceae) as case studies to address numerous questions in systematics, on the biogeographical history of south, central America, and the Caribbean, and to analyze the phylogenetic use of morphological characters. These phylogenies have been used in combination with species distribution data to address the time-for-speciation effect and the role of in-situ speciation on plant community composition in tropical America. I have conducted fieldwork in Peru, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, French Guiana, Puerto Rico, Bolivia, U.S.A and Canada.