Bayona Vásquez Lab
Conservation & Environmental Genomics

I was born in a small town in Colombia. When I was a little kid, my parents introduced me to the love of nature and the outdoors. Then, when I was 12, I snorkeled for the first time, and I was fascinated with underwater creatures, their forms, and their interactions. Since then, I knew I wanted to study natural sciences.

 

In 2003, I went to college to study Biology at Universidad Nacional de Colombia. During my junior year of college, I became interested in genetics, evolution, and molecular ecology. I started working on a project in the Conservation Genetics Lab on the population genetics of Crocodylus acutus, and then, in the same lab, I did my honors thesis on the population genetics of Plagioscion magdalenae, an endemic freshwater fish in Colombia. I was mentored by the amazing Professor MSc. Consuelo Burbano.

 

In 2009, I moved to Mexico to pursue a master's and then a doctoral degree at UNAM. I got interested in widely distributed and commercially important marine fish, systems that have since captivated me. During my academic formation, I have also been curious about molecular techniques. I have witnessed the tremendous advances in genomic technologies and bioinformatics resources in the last two decades. The rapid optimization in the field motivates me to explore new analysis methods and tools to understand how I can apply them in my research.

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I worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Travis Glenn's lab at the University of Georgia. There, I had lots of fun developing and using genomic methods on a wide array of organisms, with an emphasis on species of conservation and environmental relevance.

 

Now I lead a research lab at Oxford College of Emory University, powered by amazing first- and second-year college students. There, we work on molecular ecology spanning from kinship relationships to interactions within communities, covering population genetics and phylogeography, across an array of species from bacteria and fungi to insects and large vertebrates, all using high-throughput genomic data!