Catarina Isabel Araújo Branco

I recently completed a PhD degree at the Computational Molecular Evolution Group at the University of Vigo, and I am highly interested in Population and Evolutionary Genetics.

I started my path in Science in Portugal by enrolling in a BSc degree in Biology. Eventually, I became very interested in Genetics and Genomics, and so I continued my path by involving in a master’s degree in Genetics. During my master’s, and particularly in my dissertation, I realized the intimate relationship between Genetics and Evolution. I consider this was trigger for me to pursue a career in researching Evolutionary Genetics.

In 2017 I enrolled in a PhD degree in Spain, during which I focused on the evolutionary history of modern humans and its influence on our current genetic diversity. To achieve my goals, I developed several skills related to biostatistics (such as principal component analysis and approximate Bayesian computation) and bioinformatics (Bash, Python, and R programming languages). During my PhD I did two stays: in the Genetic Diversity Research Group led by Luisa Pereira at i3S (University of Porto, Portugal), and in the Anthropology, Population Genetics and Evolutionary Simulations led by Mathias Currat at the Univerity of Geneva (Switzerland).

Now, I joined the PlantEvol group led by Raquel Tavares to explore the evolution of plant sex chromosomes. I will try to understand the genomics behind the sex determination in dioecious plants.