Diana Lobo

I am an evolutionary geneticist driven by a long-standing interest in understanding how human activities shape wildlife evolution at the genomic level. I obtained my PhD in Biodiversity, Genetics and Evolution from the Universities of Porto and Lisbon in 2023. My PhD thesis focused on how wild-domestic hybridization can facilitate adaptation to human-dominated landscapes, using gray wolves and domestic dogs as a model system.

Following my PhD, I carried out my first postdoctoral research at BIOPOLIS-CIBIO within the EU Biodiversa+ project WOLFNESS, where I applied population genomic approaches to study wolf-dog hybrids at a European scale. My work focused on identifying the genetic mechanisms shaping hybrid genomes and assessing whether certain genomic regions are more permeable or resistant to introgression of domestic variants. I later joined the University of Insubria (Italy) as a postdoctoral researcher to investigate the evolutionary mechanisms enabling long-term persistence at extremely low effective population size, using the critically endangered Apennine brown bear as a model system.

Currently, I am a Junior Researcher in the ECOGEN group at BIOPOLIS-CIBIO, where I combine population genomics and ancient DNA approaches to study how wild species adapt to anthropogenic environmental change, with a particular focus on large carnivores.