Biologist interested in the biology of sponges, octocorals, and their bacteria

I’m originally from Costa Rica. I studied biology at the University of Costa Rica. There, I obtained a bachelor and a Master in Science degree. Toward the end of my masters I got a DAAD scholarship to visit Hannover for four months to work on octocoral molecular phylogeny. I went back to Costa Rica for a short time, and in 2007, I got another scholarship to go to Spain to learn some bioinformatics.

In 2008, I got a position in Munich, Germany and in 2009 I started to work on my doctoral thesis on antarctic sponges. I finished my doctoral degree in 2012 and moved back to Costa Rica for nine months where I worked at a company as a service engineer and did some work on octocoral phylogeny with Odalisca Breedy. I returned to Munich in late 2012 where I have been living and working on different topics, now mostly related to corals, octocorals and sponge-microbe interactions.

My current research tries to understand how a cyanosponge, which I call CBAS, interacts with its symbionts and reacts to changes in its bacterial symbiotic community. I also participate in projects on octocoral biomineralization, sponge molecular taxonomics and bacterial ecology. I am also in charge of our small Illumina MiniSeq and coordinate most lab projects dealing with genomics and transcriptomics. So, my research drifted from almost pure taxonomy to molecular systematics to sponge microbiome-omics. Together with students and colleagues, I use different NGS methods (Illumina and Oxford Nanopore) to address questions about the microbiome of CBAS, and after about three years of research results are starting to become manuscripts.

I have a family, three kids and a wife, and all this happened during the last twelve years of my life. I enjoy my work, and although I have had to struggle to keep my mind sane I find it very exciting and gratifying. Even teaching is, in retrospective, not that bad.

So, this is me…