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 outdoors. Then, when I was 12, I snorkelled for the first time and I was fascinated with underwater creatures, their forms and 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 got interested in genetics, evolution, and molecular ecology. I started working on a project in the Conservation Genetics Lab on population genetics of Crocodylus acutus, and then, in the same lab I did my honors thesis on population genetics of Plagioscion magdalenae, an endemic freshwater fish in Colombia.

 

In 2009, I moved to Mexico to pursue master's and doctoral studies at UNAM. I got interested in widely distributed and commercially important marine fish, systems that since have captivated me. During my academic formation, I also  have been curios 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 methods and tools for analyses to understand how can I make use of 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 emphasis in species of conservation and environmental relevance.

 

My research interest in molecular ecology spans from kinship relationships to interactions within communities, covering popgen and phylogeography, on an array of species from bacteria and fungi to insects and big vertebrates, all by high-throughput genomic data!