About João Tonini
I am an evolutionary biologist broadly interested in how biodiversity arises, how does it change through time and space, what are the genetic basis of phenotypes under natural and sexual selection, and how to incorporate evolutionary history as a priority to define extinction risks and species conservation strategies. To this end, I integrate phylogenetics, genomics, species distribution models, macroecological and macroevolutionary analyses of species diversification, biogeography, community ecology, and present-day extinction risk. My research focus on local and macroscale questions that demands to gather large amounts of molecular, ecological, and phenotypic data from the literature, databases, museum collections, and through my own fieldwork and genomic sequencing for ongoing projects. The result is generation novel information, new venues of research questions, and adds value to voucher specimens in natural history collections. Furthermore, this approach provides opportunities to train undergraduates and graduate students, help them feel comfortable acquiring baseline information from specimens, as well as using bioinformatics pipelines and techniques necessary to analyze different sources of genomic and biodiversity data.