Angelly Vasquez-Correa

ANGELLY VASQUEZ CORREA
PhD STUDENT

email: angelly.vasquezcorrea@mail.mcgill.ca

I received my B.Sc. Honors in Biology from Universidad de Antioquia in Colombia. During my Undergrad, I had the opportunity to take part of different projects focused on ecology, behavior and evolution. During this time, I appreciated the importance of using a comparative and integrative framework to answer to one of the major questions in biology: the evolution of morphological complexity and diversity.

Motivated by the unifying ideas of the nascent discipline called eco-evo-devo (ecological evolutionary developmental biology) and the importance of expanding developmental studies incorporating non-model organisms, I joined the Abouheif Lab in September 2017 through of Neotropical Option program (NEO) at McGill University. In collaboration with researchers from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, we are going to focus our attention on tropical ants as new model organisms to understand the diversification of a single worker caste into a complex system of morphological subcastes. My research is going to explore the origin of caste variation in the polymorphic species: the leaf-cutter, carpenter, and big-headed ants from an integrative framework, combining tropical ecology, phylogenetic comparative methods, and developmental biology.