Hernán López-Fernández
Professor and Associate Curator of Fishes
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Program in the Environment
Associate Professor of Program in the Environment, School for Environment and Sustainability, Associate Chair, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Associate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Curator, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts
I am interested in the evolutionary processes that originate “mega-diverse” biotic assemblages and the role of ecology in shaping the evolution of diversity. My program studies the evolution of Neotropical freshwater fishes, the most diverse freshwater fish fauna on earth, with an estimate exceeding 7,000 species. My lab combines molecular phylogenetics and phylogeny-based comparative methods to integrate ecology, functional morphology, life histories and geography into analyses of macroevolutionary patterns of freshwater fish diversification. We are also comparing patterns of diversification across major Neotropical fish clades. Relying on fieldwork and natural history collections, we use methods that span
