Alexandra Tyers

Alexandra Tyers is a Post-Doc Researcher at CIBIO-InBIO, University of Porto. Her research focuses on interdisciplinary studies of speciation and adaptation in desert rodents and African fish, employing fieldwork, molecular ecology, and microbiome analysis. She holds a PhD from Bangor University (UK) and conducted postdoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing (Germany). Current projects investigate Sahara-Sahelian rodent divergence through pre/post-zygotic mechanisms and environmental adaptation hypotheses. Her work bridges evolutionary genetics, ecology, and conservation.

Education: PhD in Molecular Ecology (Bangor University, 2014), followed by postdoctoral research at Max Planck Institute (2017–2020). Research expertise includes speciation genetics in cichlids, killifish aging biology, and microbiome-driven adaptation. She managed Dr. Valenzano’s lab, exploring life-history and microbiome divergence in African killifish.

Research Interests: Mechanisms of speciation, adaptation to extreme environments, evolutionary genomics, microbial ecology, and behavioral ecology. Her work addresses how species diverge through genetic, epigenetic, and ecological processes, with applications to conservation biology.

Publications highlight epigenetic divergence in African cichlids, killifish aging mechanisms, and invasive species dynamics. She contributes to projects on Lake Malawi cichlid radiations and Saharan rodent evolution. Her lab collaborations emphasize integrative approaches to evolutionary questions.