Postdoctoral Fellow
About
Mentor
Hernán López-Fernández
Fields of study
Macroevolution, trophic ecology, adaptive radiation, phylogenetics/phylogenomics, ichthyology
Research interests
I am interested in how ecology shapes macroevolutionary patterns. To test various hypotheses related to ecology and adaptive radiation, I use fish as a system, a remarkable group of vertebrates with over 35,000 species that display a staggering diversity of ecologies, form, and function as a system. I am specifically interested in (1) Investigating how trophic specialization constrains various aspects of evolution (speciation, morphology, etc.), (2) Testing the macroevolutionary and ecological effects that proposed evolutionary innovations have, (3) Determining what biotic and abiotic factors lead to disparity in species richness and functional diversity in fish adaptive radiations, (4) Understanding the functional morphology and biomechanics associated with feeding specialization.
I develop and maintain various software for biological analyses that are developed in R on GitHub