With us at the MEG: I am a Master student in "Genetica and Biologia Molecolare" at La Sapienza University in Rome.

At the MEG I am working on my Master thesis under the supervision of Dr. Alejandro Martínez García, investigating the possible deep sea's origin of cave species.

I will perform the phylogeny 10 ca. groups of animals that have been recorded in caves and in the deep sea, using mitochondrial (16S, COI) and nuclear markers (18S, 28S, H3). Then I will compare patterns using comparative evolutionary methods in order to understand whether cave-dwelling species colonized the caves from an ancestor from the deep ocean.

During my work I will implement the using of genetic sequences assembling, data mining from open access databases, database management, genetic alignment, phylogenetic analyses using maximum likelihood and Bayesian methods, comparative phylogenetic methods, statistical modelling and I will train in R programming language.