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Dr Sandra Alvarez-Carretero
Research Fellow
Genetics, Evolution & Environment
Div of Biosciences
- Joined UCL
- 1st Sep 2020
Research summary
My main interest is focused on developing and applying new methods to estimate species divergence times with molecular and morphologicalquantitative data. I aim to use these new tools in Bayesian dating analyses when combining large-scale morphological data sets (with bothextant and fossil species) with phylogenomic data sets. Assessing the mixing and computational limitations of MCMC algorithms in this type of analysis will be key to understand the compromise between computational time and data size.
Teaching summary
2016-2020
While I was a PhD student (2016/2020), I was a demonstrator/teaching assistant on the following courses:
- Demonstrator: Biochemistry laboratories [BIO199, QMUL] (2017/18)
- Demonstrator: Dry lab tutorials [BIO193 & BIO199, QMUL] (2017/18)
- Demonstrator: Thinking workshops [BIO193 & BIO199, QMUL] (2017/18 – 2018/19)
- Demonstrator: Free style laboratories [BIO193& BIO199, QMUL] (2017/18)
- Demonstrator: Stats & R [BIO309, QMUL] (2018/19 – 2019/20)
- Teaching Assistant: Computational Molecular Evolution course (May 2018 & May 2019)
- Demonstrator: Practical laboratories and Seminars [SEF033, QMUL] (2018/19)
- Demonstrator: IT stats for Molecular and Cellular Biology [BIO190, QMUL] (2019/20)
- Demonstrator: Statistics for Bioinformaticians [BIO782P, QMUL] (2019/20)
I also led the three editions of a computational workshop for beginners that wanted to learn how to code in R, Bash, and Python; which I taught together with my colleague Dr Diego Alonso. These workshops were sponsored by SRUK/CERU, and you can find the resources that we used in my GitHub account (see the corresponding repositories here and here).
2020-Current
Since 2020, I have been a research fellow at UCL. I am one of the instructors of the Molecular Evolution course (BIOL0033), where I teach the practical sessions together with Prof Ziheng Yang. Since November 2021, I am also a teaching fellow (secondment) and have been teaching the lab sessions of the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology course (BIOC0001).Supervision
Co-supervision with Prof Ziheng Yang:
- 2020/21: MSci student (dissertation): Léa Cavalli. Title: "A simulation study to explore the time-dependent rates effect in viral evolution".