Graciela Sotelo Fernández

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.