I started my career in the lab of Eugene Koonin at NCBI, NIH in 2000 leaving to do my MA degree in 2003 at University of California at Davis. In 2005 I started my PhD in University of California at San Diego graduating in 2008. In 2008 I became a Group Leader at the Centre for Genomic Regulation. In 2010 I was selected for the EMBO Young Investigator award and I also received the Dobzhansky Prize. In 2011 I became an ICREA Research Professor and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute International Early Career Scientist in 2012. From October 2017 I am on leave to IST Austria.

Research interests

We strive to understand the reasons behind the evolution of all life. One of the focuses of our laboratory is computational studies of genomic information. We analyze these data under the prism of population genetics and evolutionary theory to describe novel evolutionary and biological phenomena. We also carry out experimental work aimed at obtaining evolutionary phenomena in natural populations and measuring in the laboratory important parameters, such as the strength of selection and the rate of mutation. Overall, we use any data that we can get our hand on to understand something new about evolution and biology.