Tiago Simões started his career in his home city (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), where he obtained his BSc and MSc in Biological Sciences- Zoology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and began developing research on fossil reptiles at the National Museum of Brazil. He subsequently moved to Canada to pursue his PhD with Dr. Michael Caldwell at the University of Alberta.

Dr. Tiago Simões research interests include combining data from living and extinct species, as well as morphological and molecular data, to investigate deep time problems in reptile evolution. In recent years, he has revised previous phylogenetic and biogeographic hypotheses into the early evolution of lizards in South America and used high resolution micro computed-tomography scans of modern lizards to assess the adaptive role of the temporal region of the lizard skull. Recently, he has provided the largest dataset ever assembled to assess broad-scale reptile relationships, finding the first ever agreement between morphological and molecular hypotheses on the early evolution of lizards. Further, he demonstrated that the major reptile lineages first evolved prior to the greatest mass extinction in the history of complex life— the Permian Triassic Mass extinction. Currently, Dr. Simões is investigating the impact of the Permian Triassic Mass extinction on long-term evolutionary patterns in reptiles.