About

I was born in Colombia, where I did my undergraduate course in biology. Since the very beginning of my career, I had studied behavioral ecology, especially sexual selection, parental care, and defensive behaviors of arthropods.

 

During my master's thesis in the Department of Ecology at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil, I studied how sexual dimorphism varies among populations of earwigs. I also studied how variations in the diet during development influence the magnitude of sexual dimorphism in earwigs adulthood.

 

I recently finished my Ph.D., also at the USP. I worked with scorpions of the genus Ananteris (Buthidae), studying the sexual differences in the implications of "tail" autotomy (yes, they lose their sting and anus!) for locomotion, reproduction, and foraging. However, most of my published research has been with harvestmen, which are a wonderful model to study several aspects of sexual selection and parental care. Fortunately, during my postdoctoral research, I am having the opportunity to focus on them!