Carlos Maya-Lastra

Dr. Carlos Maya-Lastra is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at Angelo State University. He serves as Curator of the Herbarium within the Angelo State Natural History Collections and Director of the ASU Greenhouse. His academic profile shows a strong focus on evolutionary biology and computational approaches to studying speciation.

Dr. Maya-Lastra's research interests center around evolutionary processes, particularly examining genetic incompatibilities in speciation. His work combines computational modeling with theoretical evolutionary biology to understand how population dynamics influence the accumulation of genetic incompatibilities between diverging lineages. He has developed sophisticated simulation frameworks to test theoretical models of speciation.

His recent research has focused on testing whether genetic incompatibilities "snowball" as predicted by some theoretical models, using demographic simulations to examine how population size affects the accumulation of Dobzhansky-Muller incompatibilities. This work challenges established theories in evolutionary biology by demonstrating that population size dynamics significantly alter expected patterns of incompatibility accumulation.

As Curator of the Herbarium and Director of the ASU Greenhouse, Dr. Maya-Lastra oversees important biological collections and facilities that support research and teaching in plant biology and systematics at Angelo State University.