Education: Universidad de Talca, Licenciatura en Biología, 1991. Universidad de Chile, Magíster en Ciencias Biológicas, 1996. Universidad de Chile, Doctorado en Ecología y Biología Evolutiva, 2003. Centro de Estudios Avanzados en Ecología y Biodiversidad. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Postdoctoral, 2003-2004. Centro Milenio para Estudios Avanzados en Ecología y de Investigaciones en Biodiversidad, Postdoctoral (CMEB).

Present academic positions: Assistant Professor, Universidad de Chile. Young Scientist, Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity (IEB)

Honors and prizes: BBVA Prize in Research on Conservation Biology, 2004.

Research: My current research is centered on the estimation and quantification of plant responses through changes in diversity and distributional ranges under different scenarios of climate change, specifically during warm events. The time domains are millions of years (last 20 Myr) and millennia (last 20 Kyr). This approach allows us to gain a better understanding of the modern ecosystems and to improve our predictions of how they might change in the future, given that ecosystems represent the final result of a long history of interactions. Over the last years, my collaborators and I have concentrated on the study of plant remains, mainly leaves, and the statistical relationships among leaf morphology and modern climate. By using these tools as modern analogues, we have been able to reconstruct past environmental conditions and obtain quantitative estimations of temperature and precipitation, relating the latter to plant evolution in southern South America during the Cenozoic.

Publications