João Pedro Marques

João Pedro Marques, post-doc researcher in evolutionary genomics at the EVOCHANGE group.

He has a Master Degree in Biochemistry but soon have changed his focus into bioinformatics applied to sequence analysis. He started working with transcriptomic data and gene expression applied to body metamorphosis and when, in 2014, joined CIBIO-InBIO, the focus of his interests became the speciation and population genetics. As more complex questions started to arise, started to produce and work with whole genome data (e.g.: genome assembly and annotation, cluster analysis, SNPcall) and got in touch with evolution and its unsolved questions. Because of this, the willing to apply for a PhD to study in detail some of these questions became stronger.  He did his PhD in Biodiversity, Genetics and Evolution from the University of Porto (Portugal) in cotutele with University of Montpellier (France). His PhD was focused on an important conceptual problem – the role of natural selection on the formation and evolution of species. He tackled hares and mouse species in several contact zones with various degrees of divergence, gene flow and ecological differentiation and used massive amounts of genomic data resulting from modern sequencing tools, which allowed develop research in the forefront of evolutionary genomics.

Research Interests
Genomics of non-model systems promises to shed novel light onto the fundamental processes that led to the formation and evolution of species and I am particularly interested in using genomics to study the role of selection in divergence, introgression and speciation.