University of Groningen
Evolutionary ecology of marine mammals Cabrera, Andrea A.
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Publication date: 2018
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Cabrera, A. A. (2018). Evolutionary ecology of marine mammals. University of Groningen.
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About the author
Andrea Cabrera was born in Guatemala on August 17, 1985. In 2004, she began studying a
Licenciatura in Biology at the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala (USAC). Since she was a
student of biology, she found her fascination mostly among ecology, behavior and evolution of mammals. During her studies, she was trained in natural history, systematics, genetics and statistics not only in Guatemala but in other countries (Brazil, Panama, and the United States of America) as well. She received the best student award in biology for five years, the university award for excellence in 2007 and graduated Magna Cum Laude in 2011. In 2007, she started a research project on cetaceans in the Pacific coast of Guatemala in which she worked as the main coordinator until 2012, when she moved to the Netherlands. During this project, she wrote her thesis on distribution and habitat selection of cetaceans. In 2007, she did an internship at the Laboratorio de Entomologia y Parasitologia, USAC in which she studied the genetic structure of the blood-feeding insect,
Triatoma dimidiata. In 2007 and 2009, she did her professional practice at the Wild Life department
at the National Council of Protected Areas in Guatemala. From 2008 to 2011, she participated as a volunteer in a research project with the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) of the University of California, Berkeley and the USAC in Guatemala. During these years, she participated in different fieldwork trips in Guatemala working with terrestrial mammals and at the mammal collection of the Natural History Museum. In 2010, she did an internship in genetics at the MVZ in Berkeley, during which she conducted a small-scale research project investigating the phylogeography of spiny pocket mice, Heteromys desmarestianus with Prof. Dr. James L. Patton. After working for one semester as an interim professor at the USAC, she moved to the Netherlands in 2012 where she started her PhD with Prof. Dr. Per J. Palsbøll at the University of Groningen. During her PhD, she studied the evolutionary ecology of marine mammals employing simulated genetic data as well as genetic data collected from marine mammals in combination with environmental historical data. This gave her a strong background in population genetics and genomics, bioinformatics and evolution. After finishing her PhD thesis, she started working as postdoc researcher with Prof. Dr. Per J. Palsbøll, in which she will continue working on the evolution and adaptation of marine species.
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