Juan works at the Department of Earth Sciences and is the Henslow Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College. He is interested in the evolutionary relationships between extant and fossil organisms and how ecological factors - including large-scale geological events such as mass extinctions - affected morphological evolution in deep time.
His research-to-date focuses on reconstructing the origins of the anatomically modern bird body plan combining insights from living bird diversity together with key fossils spanning the dinosaur-to-bird transition. Birds are the most diverse group of living terrestrial vertebrates today, comprising nearly 11,000 living species and inhabiting virtually every subaerial ecosystem. Although the earliest birds arose and diversified during the Mesozoic (the Age of Dinosaurs), the living-bird lineage constitutes the only group of dinosaurs known to have survived through the Cretaceous-Paleogene Mass Extinction 66-million-years-ago. However, the morphological characteristics that made the lineage successful when many other bird-like dinosaurs became extinct are poorly understood. Juan’s doctoral research shed long-sought light on this crucial interval of avian evolution, particularly into the morphology of the ancestral modern-type bird palate, challenging century-old insights into avian evolution.
Juan uses a combination of traditional and cutting-edge techniques, such as comparative anatomy, phylogenetic inference, and high-resolution three-dimensional computed tomography to reconstruct morphological and ecological adaptations across avian evolutionary history. As part of his Fellowship research, Juan is expanding his focus towards the long-overlooked earliest representatives of major living bird lineages that diversified following the End-Cretaceous asteroid impact. This expanded focus is aimed towards producing a new phylogenetic framework for early Cenozoic bird fossils that will allow to test key hypotheses about the ecological filters influencing avian survivorship through the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, and how these might have impacted the extraordinarily rapid Cenozoic radiation of the group.
Show All
Volcanoes are hazardous and beautiful manifestations of the dynamic processes that have shaped our planet. Volcanoes impact our environment in numerous ways. Over geological time volcanic activity has resurfaced the Earth and provided life with a terrestrial substrate upon which to proliferate. Volcanic degassing has shaped our secondary atmosphere and as part of the process of plate tectonics, maintained just the right amount of water and carbon dioxide at the surface to produce a stable and equitable climate. Magma in the subsurface in volcanic environments today gives Society geothermal energy. The fluids degassed from magmas in the plumbing systems of volcanoes give rise to hydrothermal ore deposits, the source of much of our copper and other metals, critical to the energy transition. In this lecture I will describe the nature and importance of magma degassing for our atmosphere and oceans, as a source of both pollutants and nutrients, and in the formation of mineral deposits. I will describe my own research in carrying out measurements of volcanic gases (using a range of spectroscopic methods, from the ground and using drones), and analysis of erupted lavas, to understand the chemistry and physics of volcanic outgassing and its role in sustaining our planetary environment.
One of the many outstanding achievements of G I Taylor was the discovery of relatively simple statistical laws that apply to highly complex turbulent flows. The emergence of simple laws from complexity is well known in other branches of physics, for example the emergence of the laws of heat conduction from molecular dynamics. Complexity can also arise at large scales, and the structural vibration of an aircraft or a car can be a surprisingly difficult phenomenon to analyse, partly because millions of degrees of freedom may be involved, and partly because the vibration can be extremely sensitive to small changes or imperfections in the system. In this talk it is shown that the prediction of vibration levels can be much simplified by the derivation and exploitation of emergent laws, analogous to some extent to the heat conduction equations, but with an added statistical aspect, as in turbulent flow. The emergent laws are discussed and their application to the design of aerospace, marine, and automotive structures is described. As an aside it will be shown that the same emergent theory can be applied to a range of problems involving electromagnetic fields.
Registered address:17 Mill LaneCambridgeCB2 1RXUnited Kingdom
Business address:6A King's ParadeCambridgeCB2 1SJUnited Kingdom
Office hours at the business address:Monday and Thursday: 10am-12pm and 2pm-4pm.
Please contact philosoc@group.cam.ac.uk to agree a timing before visiting the office.