Josefa Gonzalez

Josefa is a CSIC Tenured Scientist at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE) in Barcelona where she leads the Evolutionary and Functional Genomics Lab. IBE is a joint institute between the CSIC (Spanish National Research Council) and the UPF (Pompeu Fabra University) and is part of the PRBB (Barcelona Biomedical Research Park). Josefa is primarily interested in genome evolution with a focus on structural variation induced by transposable elements. She has received a highly prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant to investigate the role of transposable elements in adaptive evolution. She is the co-organizer, together with Thomas Flatt and Martin Kapun, of the European Drosophila Population Genomics Consortium DrosEU that brings together 40 laboratories from 18 countries. She is also a co-leader of the DEST (Drosophila evolution in space and time) consortium along with Paul Schmidt, Dmitri Petrov, Alan Bergland, Martin Kapun, and Thomas Flatt.  Since her return to Spain, she has been actively involved in several science outreach projects including a citizen science project that involves high-school students from rural areas in collecting, classifying, and analyzing Drosophila melanogaster in nature. More information on this project can be found here (link: melanogaster.eu). During her time as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Petrov Lab (2005-2011) Josefa focused on the understanding of the adaptive role that transposable elements (TEs) play in Drosophila. She spearheaded the first genome-wide screen for recent TE-induced adaptations in D. melanogaster. Using several independent criteria she identified a set of 13 adaptive TEs and estimated that ~25-50 TEs have played adaptive roles since the migration of D. melanogaster out of Africa. Josefa also collaborated with Anna Fiston-Lavier on the methods of identification of TEs from next-generation sequencing data (the package is called T-lex and the paper can be found here. She also coauthored paper in MBE in 2008 and paper in 2009 on ways to distinguish adaptive TE insertion from neutral ones, a more in-depth analysis of one adaptive TE inserted near several conserved developmental genes,  and coauthored major study that convincingly showed that ectopic recombination between TEs is the source of purifying selection acting against TEs. Josefa's lab website can be accessed here. She is always looking for postdoctoral and predoctoral students. Please send her an email if you are interested.