1st Postdoc in the ZeFeFe lab

In August 2024, I joined Dr. Rosana Zenil-Ferguson’s lab at the University of Kentucky as a postdoctoral researcher. I traded the Land of Enchantment for the Bluegrass State, where I worked on developing new methods for studying macroevolution using Bayesian phylogenetic approaches.

Before I joined as a postdoctoral scholar, Rosana and I collaborated on implementing the Hidden Geographic State-Dependent Speciation and Extinction (GeoHiSSE) in RevBayes to test macroevolutionary drivers of diversification within songbirds. This research was published in Systematic Biology in 2022.

In the ZeFeFe lab, I worked with Rosana on improving hidden state diversification models in RevBayes. During my time in Kentucky, I also had the opportunity to co-lead the Inferencia filogenética Bayesiana con RevBayes workshop at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (9–11 January 2025, taught in spanish), where four instructors taught Bayesian phylogenetic methods in Spanish to graduate students and researchers. You can see the information for the workshop here.

Later that spring, I also developed and led my first workshop on scientific figure design for approximately 30 University of Kentucky graduate students. The workshop introduced students to data visualization in R using ggplot2 alongside best practices for creating publication-quality figures in Adobe Illustrator. Teaching this course sparked a passion for helping scientists develop both the quantitative and visual communication skills needed to share their research effectively, and it inspired me to continue building workshops that combine foundational R skills with scientific figure design. I recorded a YouTube version of the Illustrator portion of this workshop, which you can watch here.

I am grateful to Rosana and the members of the ZeFeFe Lab for the opportunity to continue developing my interests in macroevolutionary methods, Bayesian phylogenetics, and teaching.