About me
I am the incoming Assistant Curator of Entomology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLA), I oversee the arachnids and the SRE arthropod collections. I am originally from Mexico City, where I received a master’s and a PhD from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM). My masters focused mainly on proposing a new nomenclature for a whole group of arachnids (Schizomida), I did some test on the importance of morphological characters on phylogenetic reconstruction, using discrete and continuous characters, I did my research focusing mainly in a genus of schizomids form Southern Mexico.
During my PhD my research was focused on a larger group of Schizomids, distributed across North America, in my project I combined molecular data and morphology to evaluate and review the evolutionary history and relationships of the North American genus Stenochrus, this was the first integrative revision with New World Schizomids which resulted in the description of multiple new genera and species. We also studied the evolution of the schizomids female flagellum and the setae associated with it, we compared specimens from multiple genera around the world, resulting in a revised flagellum nomenclature and a hypothesis of the size reduction of the flagellum in modern schizomids.
In 2019 after graduating from my PhD, I became lecturer at the Sciences Faculty, UNAM in Mexico, teaching Systematic Biology to Undergrad students. In 2020 I joined the Hedin Lab at San Diego State University as a Postdoc, my research focused mainly on Mygalomorph phylogenomics and Spatial Phylogenetics, with an emphasis on exploring Mygalomorph genomic population differentiation, and diversity. I evaluated multiple hypothesis of speciation and evolution in California Mygalomorphs, as well as species limits and delineation with highly structured populations. Currently I’m still working closely with the Hedin lab studying patterns of phylogenetic diversity and conservation prioritization in the California Floristic Province.
During my time at SDSU I became passionate about bioinformatics, the need to automatize some task and speed up some processes took me to develop some tools for automatized processing of alignments for UCEs - FUSe - and currently we are working in a pipeline to facilitate the process of mapping reads to reference queries.
My passion for arthropods is linked to my passion for caves, as a young undergrad, I joined the mountaineering club and I started visiting and exploring caves in the Mountains of Central Mexico, many of those caves remain until now unexplored, as is the biodiversity inhabiting them. Curious about all these organisms I started collecting them for identifying them, which took me to collect my very first Schizomid, which was the trigger for my research with this amazing group of arachnids, these specimens were my original connection with the Arachnology Collection at the Biology Institute in Mexico City. Such passion for exploring caves and their species have taken me to learn more about short-range endemics, cave evolution and even to learn techniques of cave diving for collecting specimens in very remote places in the world!
Most of my research have focused on poorly known arthropod groups, which have been forgotten by the scientific community, as a result, one of my main goals as curator and researcher is to transmit my passion for arthropods to the people and show how diverse and important this groups are, highlight the important role they play in their ecosystems and to be able to describe this species before they are completely gone. I have participated in multiple outreach activities involving distant communities in Mexico as well as bugs fairs in USA, with the main idea to highlight how interesting Arachnids can be, but most importantly, to transmit how important they are and that we should not be afraid of arachnids, but rather preserve them, as arthropods are also in danger of getting extinct and discovery and conservation of arthropods is crucial in this changing world.