João Souto

In 2017, I enrolled in a bachelor’s degree in Biology at the University of Porto and soon realized that population genetics was the area that fascinated me the most. Therefore, in my final year, I did a curricular internship in that field at CIBIO, studying the evolutionary history of the wild boar population of Doñana National Park (Spain). In the following year, I started a master’s degree in Biodiversity, Genetics, and Evolution at the University of Porto and joined the research group EVOCHANGE to develop my thesis.

In my thesis, I am studying the evolutionary history of the broom hare (Lepus castroviejoi) and the Corsican hare (L. corsicanus) through the computational analysis of whole-genome data. Thus, this project aims to clarify the divergence history of these two species, as well as to characterize interspecific hybridization events and resulting introgression, in order to provide relevant information for the management and conservation of these species.