I am a National Geographic Explorer and PhD student at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid, Spain, where my research focuses on using environmental DNA (eDNA) to characterize benthic biodiversity and population genomics to analyze adaptation and connectivity across populations of marine species. For this project, which is funded by Nat Geo, I will be using eDNA captured from marine sponge tissue to analyze the underexplored biodiversity of the sea floor in Trinidad and Tobago’s EEZ, a method that harnesses the extreme, natural filtering capabilites of sponges to improve data resolution and enhance our ability to determine discrete ecosystems with limited sampling.
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