Damien Esquerré (Principal investigator)

I am originally from Chile but have lived in Australia since 2013. I am an evolutionary biologist and herpetologist interested in the processes that lead to increased speciation and evolution. I work on several groups of lizards, snakes and frogs, mostly from Australia and Chile but I also look at them at a more global scale. I did my Bachelor's degree in Biological Science at the Universidad Católica de Chile, and then moved to Australia in 2013 to join Scott Keogh's lab as an MPhil student, then PhD and finally I worked there for almost four years as a postdoc. I was recently awarded a DECRA Fellowship to work on snake venom evolution and was appointed as a Lecturer at the University of Wollongong. I am now building my research group. Aside from science and animals, I love photography, music, and animation. Husband to biologist Connie Leon and father to little Dalia.

Bojana Kuzmicic (Masters student)

Bojana is doing her Master at the Universidad de Valparaíso in Chile. I am co-supervising her thesis with Claudio Quezada, doing phylogeography, species delineation and taxonomy on the extremely cool and complicated Liolaemus gravenhorstii complex. Bojana is a Natural Resources Engineer from the Universidad de Chile, interested in wildlife and nature. In her spare time she likes to travel, find new species and be with her family and friends.

Academic lineage

My former supervisor and eternal mentor Scott Keogh traced back our PhD lineage which includes academic ancestors like Joseph Grinnell (hugely important in developing ecological niche theory) and Georges Cuvier (one of fathers of palaeontology). Check the lineage here. Here is a photo of four generations, left to right is my academic grand father (Rick Shine), father (Scott Keogh), great grand father (Harold Heatwhole) and me!