About me
I am an evolutionary biologist interested in protists. I sample soils, marine and freshwater, to isolate and culture microbial eukaryotes. I morphologically describe protists with light and electron microscopy, I do experiments on whole cultures and single cells to obtain high-quality molecular data (transcriptomes and genomes) to perform environmental surveys, phylogenomics and comparative genomic analyzes.
These interdisciplinary capabilities: classical taxonomy, and state-of-the-art molecular biology and bioinformatics; allow me to improve our understanding of the biodiversity, ecology, and macroevolution of protists.
During my career, I have worked with multiple eukaryotic lineages (opisthokonts, stramenopiles, archaeplastids, and various heterotrophic flagellates: ancyromonads, apusomonads, jakobids, malawimonads, mantamonads), describing 11 new genera and 18 new species, sequencing over 50 strains and robustly placing them in the tree of life.
Along my career, I have gained good knowledge on the still changing backbone of the eukaryotic tree of life, and also about conflicting phylogenetic hypotheses at the deepest parts, at the root of supergroups and the relationships between them.
My long-term goal is to learn the genomic changes that explain current eukaryotic diversity and ecology, and particularly how eukaryotes originated and diversified into the current biodiversity.
Stats as per January 2026
1 book chapter, 33 articles in GOA (22 in Q1, 64%) including 4 reviews: 12 as first/co-first (35%), 6 as co-corresponding (17.6), 2 as last and sole corresponding author (23%).
Scopus: >2,900 citations; H-index 21.
29 scientific international communications: 10 posters & 18 talks, 1 as invited speaker. Co-organizer of an international meeting and a symposium.
Co-supervisor of 5 MSc students: Elsa Boher, Sergio Vasco, Alkiviadis Grivas, Andrea Cataffo, Elena Gómez & 2 PhD students: David López, Luis Javier Galindo.
170 h of formal teaching in Bioinformatics at UPF, Comparative & Functional Genomics at ESCI-UPF, and Molecular Genetics at UB. >100 h of outreach activities.
Reviewer for 27 manuscripts in 21 scientific journals & for 2 funding agencies.
Trajectory
During my career I worked in 3 internationally renowned labs.
I started as a funded undergraduate and master student at the laboratory of Prof. Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo, resulting in my first paper. Awarded with 2 competitive fellowships to fulfil my PhD on opisthokont phylogenomics, I solved the conflicting phylogenetic hypotheses using transcriptomics of non-model organisms with a novel dataset of single-copy markers (3 publications as first author, 5 publications as collaborator). This cemented the backbone for further studies on the origin of multicellularity, and impacted fundamentally the protistology field. I sought courses, scientific societies and international meetings to expand my theoretical and methodological knowledge on deep phylogenomics. Two short-term visits: in a phylogenetics lab where I developed computational skills (Roger Lab, Canada); and in the AIRE lab (France), I broadened my view with non-tree-like evolutionary processes. During my last PhD year, I lead a project for a PhD student, resulting in my first paper as corresponding author.
During my first postdoc at the Diversity, Ecology, and Evolution of Microbes team in Paris, with Drs. David Moreira and Purificación López-García, I expanded my research on evolutionary protistology (hired with ERC grants and my own MSCA-IF). I sampled, isolated and cultured new species to improve the taxonomic sampling of various eukaryotic lineages (amoebae, algae, flagellates…). By means of microscopy diversity studies and sequencing methodologies (metabarcoding and primer-specific amplicons of environmental samples), I discovered dozens of novel species. I robustly placed them in the eukaryotic tree, pioneering the use of single-cell genomics of uncultivable organisms for phylogenomics. I forged and lead international collaborations with classic protistologists, morphologists but also biochemists. Furthermore, I co-supervised a masters and a PhD student. From this postdoc, I have 10 publications, 4 as [co-]first author and 4 as [co-]corresponding). The impact of my first postdoc is yet to be full, with publications under review or as preprints, but it has become already the main study organisms for an ERC project in Paris. Also, the protistology community recognizes me as a leading researcher as proven by the numerous reviewing duties, an invitation as keynote speaker, and the participation in the most relevant reclassification of protists (>700 citations in 3 years).
With that, I wanted to focus on genomics and comparative genomics to reconstruct ancestral states on the eukaryotic tree. In 2019, I was first in reserve for La Caixa Junior leader grant; fortunately, I was awarded with the Beatriu de Pinós fellowship to move to the BSC with Toni Gabaldón. There, I obtained high-quality genomes from my novel species of heterotrophic flagellates. For that, I obtained extra funding from the Catalan Biogenome Project. I developed an experimental and bioinformatic pipeline of low complexity metagenomics in heterotrophic flagellates. The new genomes allowed me to compare the gene of these taxa to reconstruct the ancestral gene complement in the lineage from the last eukaryotic common ancestor to animals and fungi (in preparation). During that period in which I was not allowed to co-supervise, I published two revisions on fungi and protists, the latter as corresponding author.
Currently, I am doing a 3rd postdoc in the multicellgenome lab exploring the cell biology of heterotrophic flagellates to explore the relationship between genotypes and phenotypes and I contribute to the expansion of known biodiversity codirecting 4 master students in two years. I am working on the reconstruction of ancestral protein sets and their interactions in the origin of animals (SINERGIA), including the description of new species of heterotrophic flagellates within and close to opisthokonts.
Motivation
For over a decade, I’ve been working in evolutionary protistology, and I think we need to focus on environmental studies and sampling deep-branching lineages in order to understand the ecology and to have a less biased picture of macroevolution. Although single cell -omics is helping to molecularly characterize most protists, I think culturing remains pretty important, even though it is challenging and time-consuming. Short-read sequencing has been fundamental to get draft transcriptomes and genomes, but in order to go deeper (e.g. functional studies) we need high-quality genomes, and this is why I think that it is also fundamental to use long-read sequencing and Hi-C to obtain high quality genomic data. For that, FACS is fundamental to obtain purified cells. Finally, I think that performing good imaging and morphological characterization of protists is also a fundamental work in our field, it is an art that must not be forgotten. Overall, I think that evolutionary protistology is a field in expansion, due to globalisation and technology, and I find it really exciting. As I like to say: we are now like 18th-century naturalists studying their outside world.