About me
My name is Vinicius S. Ferreira, and I am an insect taxonomist and evolutionary biologist. My main interests are focused on integrating new methods of exploring natural history museum resources for biodiversity and conservation driven projects. In my research, I employ phylogenomics, morphological, and collections-based data in a hypothesis-driven approach to understand the processes generating species diversity in insects, with a focus on beetles.
I am currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, where I employ a phylogenomic approach to investigate the repeated evolution of paedomorphosis in beetles. My current project seeks to identify evolutionary drivers and patterns behind the repeated evolution of highly convergent morphological features in beetle lineages affected by the paedomorphic syndrome, and to understand how our lack of understanding of the homology hypotheses behind these characters affect our morphology-based phylogenetic reconstructions.
I am an upcoming (Summer 2023) Beaty Postdoctoral Fellow in a collaborative project between the Canadian Museum of Nature and the Lyman Lab at McGill University, where I will integrate collections-based research, NGS, community science and artificial intelligence to produce automated tools to identify the endangered species of fireflies of North America.
Besides entomology, I am interested in history of entomology and zoology, problems and challenges of using biodiversity information and mass digitization of natural history museums collections and theory and practice of phylogenetics.
Learn more about me or get in touch through the following links:
E-mail: vinicius.sfb(AT)gmail.com
My current research project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101018841 (postdoctoral fellowship of Vinicius S. Ferreira).
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