Evolutionary Genetics - EG

Vicente García-Navas Corrales

Past Recent Members

Trajectory - I received a Ph.D. in Environmental Sciences from the University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain, in 2012. I conducted my postdoctoral research at University of Zurich, Switzerland (2014-2015, 2019-2020), Estación Biológica de Doñana, Spain (2015-2018) and Université Grenoble Alpes, France (2018). Currently, I am Assistant Researcher at the Center for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Changes (cE3c).

Research topics - I am an evolutionary ecologist with broad interests in the evolutionary and ecological processes that shape patterns of life-history and phenotypic variation in natural populations. In the early stage of my career, I mostly worked at individual level trying to better understand factors involving in two key decisions faced by all organisms at least once in the course of their lifetime: when and with whom to breed. During this period, I combined field-experiments and the employment of molecular tools. After my PhD, as postdoc in Switzerland, I continued combining field- and laboratory-based work to study from a population level perspective changes in genetic composition and social and genetic structure in a free-living population of snow voles located in the Swiss Alps. Subsequently, I moved to Doñana (Seville) wherein I started to establish the roots of my ongoing research line. The need to answer broader questions pushed me to move from working at the individual or population level to adopt a more comprehensive approach and work on a macroevolutive scale using -mostly- modern phylogenetic comparative methods, a nascent field of research. Thus, I have progressively expanded my interests from (short-term) individual decisions and taxon-specific questions to broad-scale processes that act as biodiversity engines and how these factors shape the evolution of life-history, ecological and phenotypic traits. Hence, my current research builds on my expertise in evolutionary ecology and genetics acquired during my PhD and my first postdoc, and develops it towards a broader, more sophisticated and up-to-date analysis of the agents promoting the variability we can observe in the wild. Back in Zurich, I continued deepening into these research avenues by employing state-of-the-art techniques and using vertebrate radiations as model systems with special emphasis on taxonomic groups that diversified in Australia and nearby islands. In the coming years, as PI based in Lisbon, I plan to focus my work around two main objectives: a) unravelling the drivers and processes underlying the proliferation of biodiversity (lineage diversification, phenotypic disparity) into a biogeographic context, and b) untangling the interactions between contemporary, local processes like competition and historic, long-term processes like dispersal, patterns of trait evolution, and rates of speciation/extinction in shaping the composition of present-day local communities.