Francesco Cicconardi, PhD

francicco@gmail.com

I am an evolutionary biologist and a biodiversity scientist with research experience in different organisms including basal hexapods and mammals. I am particularly interested in the study of phylogeny and phylogeography with a special focus on widespread springtail species, their relationships, population structure, and remarkable biodiversity in Tropical and Mediterranean regions. In recent years, I have gathered experience in novel high-throughput methods such as whole-genome genotyping and Next-Generation Sequencing. Using these methods, I studied Copy Number Variants (CNVs) in Bos taurus, and the transcriptomes (both mRNA-seq and miRNA-seq) of Mus musculus and Homo sapiens. As a postdoctoral fellow, I will be involved in the de-novo assembly and annotation of genomes of Tetramorium spp. and Drosophila nigrosparsa. I will assess species delimitation and adaptation, using mainly Illumina data.

Research topics
Biodiversity
Biogeography and faunistics
Bioinformatics
Climate-change biology
Genome and transcriptome biology
Phylogeny and phylogeography
Population genetics
Speciation