Sara Cristina Pinto Lopes

I graduated in Biology from the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the University of Coimbra (Portugal). I worked a few months analysing sonograms of the Corn bunting (Miliaria calandra) in order to study the dialects of this species in Alentejo (Portugal), at the Laboratory of Ethology in Coimbra. Presently, I am especially interested in studying diversity, biogeography and evolutionary processes, using amphibians and reptiles as models.

I am currently attending on the first year of the Master’s degree in “Biodiversity, Genetics and Evolution” at CIBIO-InBIO and I will start working at my Master’s thesis in September 2013. My goal is to access the role of environmental factors on patterns of gene flow and contact zone dynamics in the lizards of the Acanthodactylus scutellatus group. Population structure will be inferred using microsatellites and model-based clustering methods, and gene flow levels estimated by coalescence-based approaches.