Graciela Sotelo Fernández

Biography

"After graduating in Biology by the University of Vigo (Spain) in 2002, I joined the Population Genetics and Cytogenetics Group at the same university in 2003, where I was working first as a MSc and then as a PhD student. The subject of my PhD project was “Phylogeography of the Galician crabs Necora puber and Maja brachydactyla in the NE Atlantic”, which I completed in 2009. After that (and also shortly before), I was involved in a project dealing with the diversification patterns of Alosa species (clupeid fishes), especially focused on the Eurasian taxa. This work was carried out in the Evolutionary Biology Group at PRBB - Barcelona Biomedical Research Park (Spain), where I continued working later on in the frame of the Genographic Project (European human populations). In 2011, I moved to the University of Helsinki (Finland) to work on the adaptive differentiation of three-spine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) populations from the Baltic Sea, within the Ecological Genetics Research Unit. In a broad sense, during all this time, I was getting a growing interest in the area of speciation research, and with this aim I joined the POPGEN group at CIBIO in mid-2012. Here, I am enrolled in the project “The paths of parallel evolution and their genetic crossroads” led by Dr. Rui Faria This is a multidisciplinary study that intends to shed light on the mechanisms involved in ecotype evolution and speciation using the flat periwinkles Littorina fabalis and L. obtusata as model system."

Research Interest

Eurasian taxa