Bio

I’m a postdoctoral scholar in Nicola Müller’s group at the Experimental and Population-based Pathogen Investigation Center (EPPIcenter). My research will consist on the use of Bayesian phylodynamic models to study reassortment patterns and host-switching events in influenza viruses, with the aim of reconstructing a global reassortment map of influenza A subtypes.

I am a biologist by training, and after obtaining a BSc in Biology at the Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan (UADY), located in the south of Mexico, I continued my education overseas studying an MSc in Evolutionary Genetics at the University of Edinburgh, UK, where molecular phylogenetics became my main research interest. For my research project conducted under the supervision of Prof. Andrew Leigh Brown and Dr. Emma Hodcroft, I performed Bayesian phylogenetic analyses to estimate the evolutionary rates of the structural genes of HIV-1. Afterward, I obtained a PhD position in Germany as a member of the Transmission, Infection, Diversification, and Evolution (tide) led by Dr. Denise Kühnert at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology. During my PhD, I applied different phylodynamic approaches implemented in the software BEAST2 to study the evolutionary dynamics of human pathogens like coronaviruses, HIV, Yersinia pestis, and Salmonella enterica. After submitting my PhD thesis, I started to work at the Phylogenomics unit of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence in Public Health Research of the Robert Koch Institute, where I studied the transmission dynamics of pathogens like West Nile virus and Respiratory Syncytial virus.