Alvarina dos Santos Couto

Currently, I am a master student, under supervision of Catarina Pinho and Sara Rocha (CIBIO-InBIO/UVigo).

My research is focused in the complex group of the Iberian and North African endemic lizards, Podarcis. These cryptic incipient species offers significant challenges in the definition of evolutionary entities and its taxonomy has been under constant revision. So, I´m performing comprehensive analyses using summary statistics and full probabilistic methods for species tree inference, taking into account the evolutionary processes that can cause incongruence like ILS. This will provide new evidences about speciation dynamics of this group while enabling comparisons among the performances of different and recent methodologies.

Interests:

Molecular biology, genetics, evolution, biodiversity, bioinformatics;

Phylogeny, speciation, phylogeography, population genetics.