Joan Garcia-Porta

Joan holds a degree in Biology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a doctorate from the University of Barcelona. His dissertation, which he completed at the Institute for Evolutionary Biology (CSIC - UPF), researches processes to generate biodiversity in island-continent systems and awarded him the extraordinary doctoral prize. After a post-doctoral contract at the 'Institute for Evolutionary Biology' he went on to work at the University of New South Wales (Australia) and then returned to Barcelona as a 'Juan de la Cierva' researcher at CREAF (UAB). He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington (USA) where he studies, among other topics, the ecological and evolutionary factors that explain the wide variation in brain sizes in birds. In terms of teaching, he has worked as a visiting professor at the University of Barcelona, the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the Complutense University of Madrid.