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Recipients

 

Active Biodiversity Postdoctoral Fellows

Sonali Garg

Project Title: Integrative approaches to unravel frog diversity in India
Faculty Sponsor: James Hanken


Sonali is an amphibian biologist and has been studying frogs for about a decade. Her fascination with frogs, and their amazing diversity, has taken her on field explorations across the Indian forests and neighboring South and Southeast Asian regions encompassing four biodiversity hotspots. These pursuits have already led to the discovery and formal description of 50 new species and uncovered many more findings that await further scientific research. She combines field, museum, and laboratory studies to gather support from multiple lines of evidence for describing new taxa, resolving decades to century old taxonomic confusions and comprehensively revising the groups in question, and inferring patterns of evolutionary diversification and biogeographical distribution. At the MCZ, she continues to expand her research to strengthen knowledge on the systematics, evolution, biogeography, and eventually conservation of amphibians in Asia at large.

Shinichi Nakahara

Project Title: Documenting and explaining the high diversity of Euptychiina, a lineage of cryptic Amazonian butterflies (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae)
Faculty Sponsor: Naomi Pierce


Shinichi has a passion for taxonomy and nomenclature, and his research orients around understanding the diversity of butterflies in the Neotropical region. Although his published works on Neotropical butterflies range from immature stage documentations to biogeographical study, the majority of his work is based on morphology and molecular data to address species-level taxonomy of a number of butterfly genera in the tropical Americas, as well as reorganizing generic classifications. Consequently, he has described over 60 butterfly taxa, and he will continue to revise taxonomy to understand why the Neotropical region harbors a disproportionate amount of Earth's butterfly fauna. 

Thalles Platiny Lavinscky Pereira
Project Title: 50 new species for the 49th state - Alaska: using integrative taxonomy to illuminate a dark taxon (Diptera: Phoridae)
Faculty Sponsor: Brian D. Farrell


Thalles’ research focuses on the diversity of flies (Diptera), especially the Phoridae family, using morphological and molecular data (barcoding with nanopore sequencing technology). Additionally, his interests include natural history collections-based research, taxonomy, systematics, and co-phylogeny of ant parasitoid flies (Apocephalus series: Phoridae: Diptera). Although his previous papers and new species described (9) were based on neotropical specimens, his new project will focus on Alaskan and Beringian specimens (from +40°C to -40°C!). He will be using Large-scale Integrative Taxonomy, aiming to better understand the diversity of Phoridae in the Arctic and Subarctic Regions and its distribution patterns across Alaska, Canada, and Sweden.

Paulino Siqueira Ribeiro

Project Title: Taxonomic and phylogenetic revision of the subgenus Decamyia Dyar, genus Wyeomyia Theobald (Diptera: Culicidae) with a description of new species

Faculty Sponsor: Brian D. Farrell

 

Paulino is a biologist interested in the study of mosquitoes (Diptera, Culicidae), especially studies related to integrative biology. Throughout his professional career, he has undertaken research involving aspects of mosquito biology, ecology, and behavior of this group. Currently, his research is related to aspects of morphological taxonomy, systematics, and molecular biology of wild mosquito species of genus Wyeomyia, subgenus Decamyia. Many issues involving this subgenus need to be studied, including the taxonomic description of new species. Knowledge about these can provide a greater understanding of their real diversity and, consequently, can make the taxonomic classification of the species of the genus Wyeomyia more natural.

Incoming Biodiversity Postdoctoral Fellows (Fall 2024)

Valentine Bouju
Project Title: The history of ants: What does Miocene Dominican amber unveil about the ecological and biogeographical evolution of Formicidae?
Faculty Sponsor: Brian D. Farrell
 

I am a palaeontologist fascinated by amber (fossilized resin) and its exquisitely preserved inclusions. By enclosing samples of arthropods and plants from a long gone ecosystem, amber offers a window to past environments. I specialized in the study of fossilized insects, especially dipterans and ants, as well as the study of cryptogam plants, especially liverworts. As a palaeoentomologist and a palaeobotanist, I look into the preserved ecosystem to retrieve information on the biodiversity of the palaeoentomofauna, and on the biotic interactions. My main objective is to contribute to the inventory of palaeobiodiversity, to describe new species, and to track the morphological evolution of species. Based on the worldwide amber record, I also look at the biogeographical evolution of taxa. And thanks to a multidisciplinary biological and geological expertise, I combine the systematic results obtained with the study of the sedimentary context of the amber deposit, in order to draw a picture of the past environment and its evolution through time. At the MCZ, I will expand my research to the Cenozoic (Miocene) amber from Dominican Republic, focusing on the ant assemblage, to strengthen my knowledge of the systematics, evolution, and palaeobiogeography of the family Formicidae.

Rodrigo T. Figueroa

Project Title: Exploring pseudoscorpion diversity in the neotropics through an integrative approach.
Faculty Sponsor: Stephanie Pierce
 

Rodrigo has a passion for fossil collection and taxonomy since childhood when he found his first fossils. Years of fossil hunting and reading about extinct faunas forged his interest in understanding how life on Earth has evolved and changed over geologic time scale. Rodrigo’s research focuses on the neglected Paleozoic fish record of South America where he has already described several new fossil occurrences and new fossil taxa, studying a wide range of fishes from placoderms to ray-finned fishes. His current research focuses on shaping patterns of morphological evolution along the earliest branches of the ray-finned fish tree, relying on a combination of field and museum collection work as well as CT-scanning. In recent years Rodrigo has developed several lines of work ranging from description of new Paleozoic ray-finned fishes to working on soft-tissue preservation in the fossil record of fishes.

Catalina Romero Ortiz

Project Title: Exploring pseudoscorpion diversity in the neotropics through an integrative approach.
Faculty Sponsor: Gonzalo Giribet
 

Catalina, a Colombian biologist, is driven by her passion to uncover the true diversity of Pseudoscorpiones in the Neotropics. Her research is dedicated to evaluating the effectiveness of taxonomic characteristics in species delimitation and delving into the morphology of pseudoscorpion genitalia for taxonomic and systematic purposes. Additionally, she seeks to identify novel traits that can shed light on the intricate nature of species within this arachnid group. Having previously served as an assistant curator of the largest Arachnida collection in Colombia, Catalina consistently emphasizes the pivotal role of biological collections in advancing biodiversity knowledge. Her forthcoming work at MCZ will employ an integrative approach, incorporating both molecular and morphological data, to review and describe new species predominantly found in leaf litter habitats. This comprehensive investigation will draw upon specimens from the MCZ as well as newly collected material primarily sourced from regions spanning Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela.

Past Biodiversity Postdoctoral Fellows

Paula Rodríguez Flores (2021-2023)

Project Title: Systematic revision of worldwide deep sea squat lobsters
Faculty Sponsor: Gonzalo Giribet

Paula is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Smithsonian, National Museum of Natural History. 

Miquéias Ferrão (2020-2021)

Project Title: Description of new species of anurans from Brazilian Amazonia through integrative taxonomy
Faculty Sponsor: James Hanken

After his fellowship, Miquéias moved to a postdoctoral fellowship with the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.

Cong Liu (2020-2022)

Project Title: Ant biodiversity in China's Hengduan Mountain region
Faculty Sponsor: Naomi Pierce

After his fellowship, Cong's work in the Naomi Pierce Lab continues as an Associate of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. 

Stephen Pates (2019-2020)

Project Title: Beyond the Burgess Shale and Chengjiang: Systematics, phylogeny and evolution of Radiodonta (stem-group Euarthropoda) from untapped Cambrian Lagerstätten
Faculty Sponsor: Javier Ortega-Hernández

After his fellowship, Stephen joined the University of Cambridge Department of Zoology as a Herchel Smith Postdoctoral Fellow.

Whitney Preisser (2021-2022)

Project Title: Revealing the hidden diversity of digenean trematodes within the MCZ Ichthyology Collection
Faculty Sponsor: Gonzalo Giribet and George Lauder

After her fellowship, Whitney joined the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology at Kennesaw State University as Assistant Professor of Disease Ecology.

Tiago Simões (2019-2021)

Project Title: The long-term impact of a climate change-driven mass extinction on global biodiversity and evolutionary patterns in reptiles
Faculty Sponsor: Stephanie Pierce

Tiago is currently an incoming faculty member in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University.

Diego Biston Vaz

Project Title: Taxonomic review of dwarfgobies, Eviota Jenkins, 1903, one of the most diverse genus of marine fishes
Faculty Sponsor: George Lauder

After his fellowship, Diego joined the University of Guam as a Senior Researcher (Ichthyologist) and Associate Curator of the Biorepository.