We are happy to welcome our new Senior Post-Doctoral Fellow Mauricio Gonzalez-Forero to the KLI. Mauricio is an evolutionary biologist working at the interface of biology, mathematics, and anthropology. He received his undergraduate degree in Biology in 2006 at the University of Antioquia in Colombia, and his PhD degree in 2013 from the University of Tennessee in the USA. Mauricio has worked as a post-doc researcher at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland (2013-2016), and the University of St Andrew in the UK, first as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow (2016-2018), and then as a Research Fellow (2018-2024).

Mauricio’s research interest lies in developing mathematical theory to address biological questions, including: why human brain size evolves, how development affects evolution, what caused the major evolutionary transitions, and what is a species. At the KLI, Mauricio will be taking forward his mathematical theory of evo-devo dynamics, through a project titled, “Advancing a Mathematical Theory Integrating Development and Evolution”. The idea behind evo-devo dynamics is that, to understand the evolution of the phenotype over longer-term scales, we need to also track the evolution of the underlying genotype. Untill now, the theory that Mauricio has developed is only applicable to scenarios in which genotypic traits are continuous, development is deterministic, and there is only a single sex. In his KLI project, Mauricio would works towwards extending his theory such that it doesn't require these simplifying assumptions, and is therefore more applicable to real-world scenarios.

In addition to his research, Mauricio is an active member of the Society for Modeling & Theory in Population Biology, and has also worked as a private consultant (Sensitivity of human life expectancy to perturbation) for the University of Basque Country, Spain from 2023-2025.

We wish Mauricio an enjoyable and productive time at the KLI, and also in Austria.

Know more about Mauricio from his website: mauriciogforero.github.io