News

• 01/12/2024 - Wanyi Wei will be joining us in Oslo as a PhD student. Welcome!
• 13/11/2024 - New paper out! Understanding human-commensalism through an ecological and evolutionary framework
• 02/10/2024 - New preprint out on transposable elements and Scalesia where we test whether TEs are associated with hybridization (genomic shock hypothesis) or climatic niches
• 30/09/2024 - PhD position available to work with me
• 13/09/2024 - Just made a new website for our lab. I’ll be keeping this one as my personal website, but check our lab website
• 11/09/2024 - The Research Council of Norway has awarded me a ‘Young Researcher Talent’ grant to work on diversification dynamics and genomics of Galápagos plants. A PhD position will be advertised soon!
• 12/08/2024 - Geraldine Rueda-Muñoz and Diego Salazar have joined the lab as MSc students!
• 12/08/2024 - Back to work after a 6-months break.
• 09/08/2024 - Paper accepted on Galápagos Opuntia!! More to come soon.
• 03/06/2024 - Yang et al is now published in EJLS “Consistent accumulation of transposable elements in species of the Hawaiian Tetragnatha spiny-leg adaptive radiation across the archipelago chronosequence”
• 03/06/2024 - De-Kayne et al is now published “[Why Do Some Lineages Radiate While Others Do Not? Perspectives for Future Research on Adaptive Radiations ](https://academic.oup.com/evolinnean/article/3/1/kzae005/7681133”
• 01/02/2024 - On paternity leave - back in August!
• 23/01/2024 - New paper out, from my times as a MSc student Fruit wings accelerate germination in Anacyclus clavatus
• 07/01/2024 - Yang et al; Preprint out and paper submitted. “Consistent accumulation of transposable elements in species of the Hawaiian Tetragnatha spiny-leg adaptive radiation across the archipelago chronosequence” - my first ‘senior’ author paper.
• 06/01/2024 - Happy new year from the Canary islands - where I am visiting Brent Emerson and ‘botanizing’ :).
• 05/12/2023 - Join us for the Oslo Bioinformatics week, where I’ll be teaching comparative genomics with other colleagues from EBP (Ole Tørresen, Helle T. Baalsrud, & Bram Danneels). I’m in charge of the dN/dS part :)
• 07/11/2023 - I’ll be returning to Spain in the summer to give an invited talk in the XX international botany conference. Really, really looking forward to this. :)
• 06/11/2023 - (co-authored) Paper accepted! “Fruit wings accelerate germination in Anacyclus clavatus (Asteraceae)” in the American Journal of Botany. From my times as MSc student in Ecology. :)
• 02/11/2023 - I will be hosting two MSc students the next two years as part of the BiGTREE network: Diego Salazar Ccatamayo from Peru and Geraldine Rueda from Colombia - I’ll be suggesting we do some (cool) simulations using SLIM under some scenarios of island colonization :)
• 01/11/2023 - I will be going to the Canary Islands to visit Brent Emerson in January! I so look forward to this.
• 01/11/2023 - We got some generous funding from NORBIS to organize two courses: one on comparative genomics (April), another on Ancestral Recombination Graphs (tentatively August). By, “we”, I am including my brilliant and kind colleague, Ole Tørresen.
• 25/10/2023 - Rejected by the Norwegian Research Council (with high scores). Science can be (is) difficult.
• 18/10/2023 - ERC resubmitted. Fingers crossed! Time to do some research (some cool transposable element work on spiders, fish and plants to come out within the next few weeks).
• 05/10/2023 - Check out our pre-print on Giant Galápagos cacti?, co-first authored by me and Felipe Zapata :)
• 19/09/2023 - My opinion piece on parallel, repeated and convergent evolution is now published in Molecular Ecology!
• 20/08/2023 - Ivo Cerca Knutsen was born today - and I’ll be off for a couple of weeks for paternity leave (then leave again between February-July 2024).
• 19/07/2023 - ERC StG rejected - I did get many good comments am starting the motors to get it submitted in October!
• 15/07/2023 - My collaborator Juan Guevara Andino just got a project funded to explore functional traits in diverse Galápagos plant groups. Let’s go!!
• 10/07/2023 - (co-authored) Paper accepted in the Cold Spring Harbor Press, Perspectives in Biology!
• 10/07/2023 - Paper accepted in Molecular Ecology - Multiple paths toward repeated phenotypic evolution in the spiny-leg adaptive radiation (Tetragnatha; Hawai’i)
• 07/07/2023 - Participating in the Island Biology Conference was tons of fun.
• 01/07/2023 - Trends in Ecology and Evolution selected our paper to be their July cover!
• 05/06/2023 - ERC Starting Grant interview day … now for the waiting game :)
• 05/04/2023 - My collaborator Lois just got funded for us to sequence genomes of European Crossbill species! Yet another fun project starting :)
• 03/04/2023 - Working on DNA extractions of Norwegian (semi-)domesticated and wild reindeer! More to come in the upcoming years.
• 30/03/2023 - I was invited to interview for the ERC Starting Grant. I’m as humbled as I am frightened!
• 10/01/2023 - Short visit at the University of Nottingham! I got to meet and discuss with wonderful people (Mary O’Connell, Andrew Maccoll, Levi Yant, among others) - thanks to Mark Ravinet for inviting me.
• 07/01/2023 - Just participated in the PopGroup UK meeting. What a fantastic conference.
• 01/01/2023 - Started a new postdoc at the University of Oslo after leaving to Berkeley 3 years ago. Feels good to be back - new principal investigator, new center, new department
• 04/12/2022 - Teaching speciation genomics with two fantastic scientists I really enjoy working with, Mark Ravinet and Joana Meier
• 01/12/2022 - New pre-print, Multiple paths towards repeated phenotypic evolution in the spiny-leg adaptive radiation (Tetragnatha; Hawai’i)
• 15/11/2022 - Frasella Martino Fonseca, from Colombia, will be joining me as a MSc student from the BiGTREE network.
• 31/10/2022 - I’m teaching introduction to bioinformatics for Forbio!
• 01/10/2022 - I’m happy to announce I’ll be joining Kjetill Jakobsen at the University of Oslo by January! 4 years postdoc associated with the EBP-Nor
• 20/08/2022 - The ESEB symposium was a success - we had a packed room! Thanks to everyone who made it (speakers, posters, audience).
• 15/08/2022 - Back from some revitalizing holidays :)
• 01/07/2022 - I wrote a paper on parallel, repeated, convergent evolution
• 01/06/2022 - Scalesia atractyloides genome paper accepted. Find The genomic basis of the plant island syndrome in Darwin’s giant daisies here .
• 12/05/2022 - I got a talk on ESEB 2022. Backstory being: I decided I wanted to be an evolutionary biologist at the 2013 ESEB in Portugal. I always day-dreamed about having an ESEB talk. Took me 9 years, but happened :)
• 28/04/2022 - Back to the Bay! Visiting friends at UC Berkeley for a few days :)
• 15/04/2022 - Visited the beautiful city of Tena and the brilliant IKIAM university. Collaborations lying ahead!
• 15/03/2022 - Fun times ahead! Just received a genomics dataset of Galápagos’ cacti to analyse.
• 12/03/2022 - Co-first author paper on bowhead whales accepted in Scientific Reports.
• 10/03/2022 - My collaborator Bashir just submitted the big paper of his PhD. Fingers crossed that it goes high.
• 22/02/2022 - Just received a award rejection on the 2022 John Maynard Smith Prize of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology. More chances will come!
• 16/02/2022 - Our time in the Galápagos came to an end. I bring home some fantastic memories, and knowlege of many ideas and study systems.
• 28/01/2022 - Just posted online my first preprint on the genome of Scalesia!
• 15/01/2022 - I’ll be taking a BSc student from the Universidad de las Fuerzas Armadas de Ecuador - Pável Enriquez will be assembling chloroplast genomes of Scalesia!
• 03/01/2022 - We just got a symposium accepted at ESEB - join us for “Repeated and parallel evolution in adaptive radiations”.
• 01/01/2022 - Happy New Year! Our project BiGTREE (Biodiversity Genomics Training, Research, Education and Exchanges), where we have 1,000,000 USD to train LatinAmerican students starts today. Really looking forward to five years of collaboration, classes, receiving MSc/PhD students in Norway and sending Norwegians abroad.
• 16/12/2021 - I won the 2021 best PhD/MSc paper award competition from the Natural History Museum in Oslo.
• 15/11/2021 - Spider Genome Evolution paper accepted in Genome Biology and Evolution
• 10/11/2021 - Our PhD student, Jaime, was admitted to the PhD programme at the NTNU! He will be working with Parrot evolution.
• 01/10/2021 - Getting ready to start my big adventure. As it looks, I’ll spend 3 months in the Galápagos, 3 in Quito (Universidad San Francisco de Quito), 3 in Davis (UC Davis), and 3 months in Copenhagen (U. of Copenhagen). 2021 has been a rough year personally (breaking fingers, home office, etc) and I really look forward for this chance.
• 15/09/2021 - Our OH-KNOW (K-mer) course was a success. We have uploaded the tutorials here, and will be soon publishing the Youtube lectures.
• 15/09/2021 - We (Mark Ravinet, Rauri Bowie, Martim Melo, Ângela Ribeiro) obtained funding to sequence the genome of the Cape Verde sparrow and do a season of fieldwork (24,000 USD). More to come, in late 2022.
• 15/08/2021 - Registrations closed to our OH-KNOW K-mer workshop - looking really forward to teaching some K-mer based assigning of polyploids.
• 10/08/2021 - I received a tough grant rejection with 6/6/6 (overall 6) out of 7. Only really minor comments this time. Focusing on a MSCA and a Norwegian Mobility grant now! I am determined on getting my ‘prestigious fellowship funding’.
• 21/07/2021 - I started two YouTube Channels: One on Genomic Data analysis in English and one on Science Communication on Evolutionary Genomics in Portuguese.
• 20/07/2021 - I submitted the spider genome paper ‘fingers crossed’ (not that I can..)
• 20/07/2021 - Paper accepted! “Pervasive admixture and the spread of a large-lipped form in a cichlid fish radiation!” will be soon out in Molecular Ecology
• 20/07/2021 - Back in business after my sick-leave!
• 03/06/2021 - Staying out for a few weeks, since I broke a finger in each hand! Expecting a 6 weeks leave.
• 26/04/2021 - We will be starting our ForBio Course Introduction to Bioinformatics
• 10/04/2021 - I will be giving a Scan seminar on Genome Evolution in the Scalesia group, to the ITQB in Lisboa, PT.
• 04/04/2021 - This week I’ll be teaching my first class for the NTNU - A 2 hour lecture on Island Biogeography for undergraduates!
• 28/03/2021 - Just gave two presentations on my background and motivation to do research abroad, to the Portuguese Meeting for Biology Students - hopefully we will find some more PT Evolutionary Biologists in the making!
• 17/03/2021 - I hosted a Genomics Social Hour on Island Adaptive Radiations, which was really nice! I can’t take any credit, since the speakers put on an excellent show, and we had >100 participants.
• 17/02/2021 - My fellowship “Ecological speciation, polyploidy, and the rewiring of transcriptomic networks: untangling the drivers for genomic novelty and genomic functionality” was funded by the Norwegian Research Council - 1,691,000 NOK to collaborate with & visit the Galápagos, Quito, Copenhagen, and Davis (California)!
• 16/02/2021 - Just accepted hosting a speed-dating session on careers and paths on Evolutionary Genomics to the ENEB (Portuguese National Meeting for Biology Students) in March. Really looking forward
• 12/02/2021 - Happy Darwin Day! I am talking at a Portuguese high-school to some 17/18 year olds about careers in science.
• 15/01/2021 - When it rains, it pours! I got two papers first-authored accepted this week (one in PeerJ, another in Methods in Ecology and Evolution). Time to celebrate!
• 10/01/2021 - Tune in for a session I am organizing soon, entitled Evolution of those around us: Genomics of commensalism and urban evolution
• 22/12/2020 - Just got a rejection on a grant application on commensalism and urban evolution in Cape Verde. It’s tough, but will resubmit this until I eventually get it (since I think it’s a nice project)
• 28/10/2020 - I just created the DarwinPlants website!
• 01/10/2020 - I just got enrolled as a supervisor of two MSc students. Jaime is working on parrots & Nina will be working on snakes! Both projects involve looking at genomics (mitochondrial genomes, phylogenies, SNP-calling & popgen!)
• 01/09/2020 - See my first Rxiv paper: Removing the bad apples: a simple bioinformatic method to improve loci-recovery in de novo RADseq data for non-model organisms
• 17/08/2020 - First day at my new job in Trondheim!
• 10/07/2020 - I accepted a position in the Natural History Museum in Trondheim, with Mike Martin, to work with the adaptive radiation of Galapagos Scalesia. I’ll start on August 15th
• 25/06/2020 - the last paper of my PhD has been submitted. Fingers crossed!
• 05/06/2020 - I successfuly defended my PhD, entitled “On The Origin of Cryptic Species”.. now I need to find myself a job!
• 29/05/2020 - My Trial lecture is online. These are 45-minute lectures on a topic related, but not necessarily overlapping with the candidate’s PhD. I got “The relevance of undescribed species for science and society, and the potential for elucidation through genomics”.
• 29/05/2020 - Game on! My PhD defense has been publicly announced. You’ll be able to hear me live via zoom.
• 11/05/2020 - Our California Conservation Genomics Project was funded. We will be looking at signatures of urban adaptation in a black-widow species across California!
• 08/05/2020 - My Spider Comparative Genomics for the Genomics Social Hour is online! (begins at 14:27)
• 03/04/2020 - Tune-in for my RADseq methods talk on the Virtual Genomics Social Hour!
• 04/2020 - Currently searching/applying for post-doctoral positions!
• 03/2020 - The CalAcademy is organizing a Virtual Genomics Social Hour
• 03/2020 - Back Home - with the Pandemic we had to move back to Norway. Stay safe, everyone!
• 01/2020 - PhD Viva scheduled for the 5th of June
• 01/2020 - We got the cover! - Evolution Volume 74, 1st Issue
• 01/2020 - Website created - welcome!