New DDLS Fellow: Mariana Pires Braga
Our latest SciLifeLab & Wallenberg National Program for Data-Driven Life Science (DDLS) Fellow, Mariana Pires Braga (SLU), shares her thoughts about becoming a DDLS Fellow and her plans for the future, in our latest Q&A-style article. Mariana will be joining the Evolution & biodiversity research area.
Mariana is originally from a town up in the mountains close to Rio de Janeiro, in the middle of the Atlantic Forest. She got her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Brazil and then moved to Sweden to do a PhD at Stockholm University. That’s when she started studying butterflies and their host plants. In 2019, she moved to the US for a postdoc at Washington University in St. Louis. Then, in 2021, she was awarded an International Postdoc Grant from the Swedish Research Council and moved back to Sweden, but not before spending time at the University of Helsinki.
How do you think your expertise can contribute to the program?
Within our research area there are fellows working across the micro-macroevolution scale. I’m at the macro end of this scale, trying to figure out the processes that generate the large-scale patterns we see in nature. Me and my group will contribute new computational methods for studying complex evolutionary processes, as well as tools to speed up data collection in regions of the world where data biases hinder our ability to understand nature. These methods can be used in a variety of biological systems and can be useful to other fellows in their research.
Shortly describe your research in an easy to understand way.
My favorite biological study system is butterflies and the host plants their caterpillars need to survive because they are very diverse, they occur all over the world, and we have enough data to get started (we always want more data!). I study how species interactions evolve and how that can increase the number of species that exists in the world. To do that, I develop methods to use information from ecological networks (which summarizes data from the literature and new data we collect on who eats whom) and phylogenetic trees (which summarizes who is more closely-related to whom).
How do you think the program and interactions with the other DDLS-Fellows will benefit you?
The DDLS Fellows are very diverse and that makes us a very strong and interesting group of people. I can see myself collaborating with other fellows that also study evolution but at different biological scales (for example, at the genetic or population levels), as well as with fellows working on completely different topics but using methods that can be applied to my own research. I really believe that we can produce high-quality interdisciplinary research together.
Name one thing that people generally do not know about you.
I dance a lot! Ballet is currently my favorite style, but I like trying everthing from salsa to hiphop, contemporary to lindyhop.
Where do you see yourself in five years regarding the DDLS aspect?
I see myself and my group helping others to overcome the ubiquitous geographical bias in biodiversity data, which will allow us all to achieve truly general understanding of how biodiversity evolves, how it is structured in space, and how we can best prevent biodiversity loss.
In one word, describe how you feel about becoming a DDLS-Fellow.
Excited!
