Since 2014 I am an ICREA Research Professor in Computational and Theoretical Ecology at CEAB-CSIC and hold an associate research position at CREAF. I hold a MSc in plankton ecology (1997), and a PhD in Biological Sciences (2005) from the University of Barcelona, Spain. I joined the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University (USA) from 2006 to 2009. I completed my postdoctoral research on vector-borne diseases at the Institut Català del Clima (IC3). With a Ramón y Cajal position (2010) I founded my own lab at CEAB-CSIC, currently it is a joint lab with other researchers, named the Theoretical and Computational Ecology Group.In 2018, I was awarded as Distinguished Researcher by the Spanish Research Council (CSIC), and by the City Council of Barcelona (Spain) Premi Ciutat Barcelona 2017.

Research interests

Knowledge of how animals use information to search and disperse in dynamic environments can generate direct applications (biorobotics, bioinformatics) and improve our baseline predictive power with consequences for fields as diverse as behavioural ecology, invasion ecology, or epidemiology. We are contributing to the sudden generation of massive, high-throughput animal movement and behavioural data in the context of vector-borne diseases, with the use of novel technologies (internet, smartphones) and citizen participation. We also seek for understanding organizational and dynamical principles of search behaviour developing high-tech infrastructures for tracking movement behavior at an unprecedented range of scales. Our work aims at building-up mechanistic links between animal behavior and population dynamics, including the developement of data mining algorithms for behavioural annotation of high-resolution trajectories and biologging data, and spatial population modelling.