I am a biologist from Medellín (Colombia), a vivid city embedded in the beautiful mountains
of the Central Andes of northwestern South America. I discovered that science was all what I
wanted to do for a life at the INEM José Felix de Restrepo, a public high school in Medellín with
an extended curriculum in science (math, geology, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and
biology). Meanwhile, I also discovered a passion for outdoors; my high-school friends and I
went out frequently for hiking and camping to spectacular locales, many of which I would
love to return to, now as a professional biologist. Although I didn't have any clue
on avian diversity or identification at the time, those conspicuous birds we saw during those early
trips like guans, toucans, oropendolas, jays, and oilbirds left some sort of imprint in my mind.

   After one long, wasted year in the military obligatory service in Colombia, I finally started
the undergrad program in Biology at the Universidad de Antioquia. This was the place I got
interested in ecology and evolution, and in birds! Despite we lacked an ornithology class, fellow
students and I formed a journal club choosing bird-oriented papers and started to carry out field
trips to the montane forests around Medellín. We got funds for small projects like the bird
inventory of the cloud forests of La Forzosa Reserve in Anorí (Dept. Antioquia) that resulted
in the discovery of the Chestnut-capped Piha (Lipaugus weberi), and natural history studies on
threatened species like the Red-bellied Grackle (Hypopyrrhus pyrohypogaster). Although
systematics was always my primary interest, in my undergraduate thesis I studied how forest
fragmentation affects tarsus morphology and body size distribution of an Andean bird community.
Right after graduation, I moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico to start a Master's program in tropical
biology at the University of Puerto Rico (and for rusting under the Caribbean sun playing beach
volleyball!). I expanded the research I started in my undergraduate project to explore new but
related hypotheses on the relationship between fragmentation and development and growth of
tropical montane birds. At the same time, I was collecting samples I'm now using for my
current projects.

   With the goal of fueling ideas and gathering samples for my prospective dissertation project,
I returned to Colombia for one year after graduating from UPR. I taught ornithology at
Universidad de Antioquia and traveled to the Amazon, the Llanos foothills in the Eastern
Andes, the Magdalena valley, Chocó, but mostly to the Central and Western Andes.
Meanwhile I looked for a graduate program where I could develop a research program
centered on investigating the origin of diversity of tropical montane birds from an evolutionary
perspective, combining field and museum work with advanced molecular and statistical
techniques.

   In August 2006, I joined the exceptional group of evolutionary biology and ornithology at the
Museum of Natural Science, Louisiana State University (LSU). My dissertation on avian speciation
and population differentiation in the Northern Andes is directed by Dr. Robb T. Brumfield and is
co-advised by Dr. J. Van Remsen. I have been accumulating DNA sequence data for many Andean
populations during the past year and I'm looking forward to an extended 2008 field season
in the fascinating cloud forests of the Andes of Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela. Click on
the Research button for more details about my projects.