BIOGRAPHY
I was
born December 7, 1970, in San
Fernando, Buenos Aires, Argentina, where most of my family still lives. I
received my university
licence (Licenciatura) in Biology in 1995 at the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences
of the University of Buenos Aires. I
did my licence thesis under the direction of Ricardo Gürtler,
studying the transmission dynamics of Chagas’ disease. Ricardo
was an excellent mentor, infinitely patient, and with him I learned the
basic principles on how to conduct a scientific research project.
In 2002 I received a Ph.D. in ecology at
the Department of Ecology and
Evolutionary Biology, University of
Tennessee, Knoxville. In Tennessee I was
lucky
to have Dan
Simberloff as my advisor, one of the greatest scientists and
scholars I have ever met; I particularly admire his intellectual
curiosity and honesty. For my dissertation I
studied the effects of introduced ungulates on plant-pollinator
interactions in Nahuel
Huapi National Park, in the temperate forest of the southern
Argentine Andes. The Nahuel Huapi area is truly one of the most
beautiful places I have seen in my life. I worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Center for Ecological
Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), in beautiful Santa Barbara,
California. NCEAS is a great place to do research, with lots of
excellent colleagues to interact with.
Since July 2005 I am a CONICET researcher at the Argentine Institute of Dryland Research,
in Mendoza, a city of almost one million people at the foot of the
highest peaks of the Andes. I spend most of my time doing research, most of it in collaboration with people in our lab and other colleagues. I also teach Ecology at the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, every once in a while I organize graduate-level courses, and collaborate as associate editor for the Revista de la Sociedad Entomológica Argentina and as subject editor for the journal Oikos.