Mariana Villalba de la Pena

Biography

I studied for a bachelors degree in biology at UNAM in Mexico and I graduated in September 2014 and am now a PhD student in the Adaptive Organismal Biology program. My main research interest is in evolutionary biology, phenotypic plasticity and epigenetics.

My PhD project focuses on developmental plasticity. The aim of the project is to establish fitness and developmental consequences of experiencing changes from early to late environment in the pacific beetle cockroach Diploptera punctata. First I will try to find different phenotypes associated with different environments and then relate phenotypic differences to differences in the epigenome, especially to tissue-specific methylation patterns.