News

Super excited to start a new position at Invitae today—a genetic diagnostic company—and to learn all things human genetics!! Who knew that after 12 years of working on non-model organisms I was going to end up working on humans, the model organism?

It’s been a wild and fascinating ride—Let’s go!!

A new paper from my postdoc work at UMSL was published today! It uses genomic data generated using a targeted sequence capture approach. Great to see this work on print 🙂

Here’s a link to the paper.

I’m extremely happy to announce that I described a new species of Neobartsia: Neobartsia matuy Malagón, Humberto Mend. & Uribe-Convers, in an article published today.

The name “Matuy”, was chosen to honor my parents, Maria Luisa Convers and Ernesto Uribe, whose support was invaluable during my dissertation on the genus. My parents do not use their given names and are better known by their nicknames “Marily” and “Tuchi”, respectively, and the word “Matuy”—a combination of their nicknames—has been used for years among family and friends to refer to both of them.

This basically concludes my research over 10 years on this beautiful group of plants, and I couldn’t have dreamed of a better way to end it. ❤️

You need to find what makes you happy, what makes your curiosity and heart tick. For many years I thought academia was that for me but I’ve come to understand that it’s not. In my pursuit of happiness, I have accepted a position as a data scientist at Phylagen, a startup in San Francisco committed to harnessing the unseen world of microbes to improve our daily lives. I’ll get to work with large sequencing datasets, combining my love for bioinformatics, big data, and biodiversity.

Here’s to a new start, a new path, and a whole new adventure!

Wow, what an awesome project!

As a postdoc at the University of Michigan, I have been working on building the Fungal Tree of Life using all the Sanger data available on Genbank! I couldn’t have done it alone though, my advisor Stephen Smith and ~10 other collaborators—each one an expert on a single fungal lineage—were instrumental in the project, so thank you!

The final phylogeny has data for 13 of the 15 fungal subphyla and has 29,993 tips—yes, that’s ~30K different species of fungi! 🍄🍄🍄

It’s, of course, way too big to display correctly, but here it is anyways! 😊

 

Lately, I have been working on mapping the evolution of woodiness on the Plant Tree of Life.

For this project, I used the trait data collected by Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI)—available through GlobalTreeSearch—and the phylogeny built by Stephen Smith and Joseph W. Brown. The tree contains almost every plant species (~353,000!!)  and the paper describing the process of building it can be accessed here.

The main findings are 1) that being herbaceous might be the ancestral state and 2) that the evolution of wood has happened many times but only on certain clades.

Here is a figure of this super cool project that uses amazing data and research by others—I’m definitively standing on the shoulders of giants.