Since 2014 I have been an ICREA Research Professor in Computational and Theoretical Ecology at CEAB-CSIC and hold an associate research position at CREAF. I hold an 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 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 the City Council of Barcelona (Spain) Premi Ciutat Barcelona 2017. 

Research interests

Knowing how animals use the information to search and disperse in dynamic environments can generate direct applications (robotics, 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 to understand organizational and dynamical principles of search behaviour by developing high-tech infrastructures for tracking movement behaviour at an unprecedented range of scales. More broadly, our work aims at building-up mechanistic links between animal behaviour, dispersal and population dynamics, including the development of data mining algorithms for behavioural annotation of high-resolution trajectories and biologging data, and spatial population modelling.