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.
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The fundamental laws of physics look different when reflected in a mirror. This is the statement that the laws of physics have a handedness, what physicists call chirality. This is one of the most important facts that we know about the universe, a fact that, remarkably, goes a long way to fixing the mathematical structure of the laws of nature. I will explain how we know about this handedness, why it’s so important, and why there are still several chiral mysteries that remain unsolved.
Dementia is a topic of considerable public interest. How empirical evidence has contributed to this societal awareness and indeed fear will be covered in this talk. It will span research from the 1980s when not much was understood about dementia up to contemporary perspectives. The focus will be on the epidemiological and public health evidence base, and how this relates to the results published from clinical and lab based research. The findings from UK and other high income countries of reduced age specific prevalence (%) will be explored, and the implications of results from brain based studies that dementia is not inevitable in the presence of ‘alzheimer’ type changes. The role of inequalities, risk varying across countries and time and our knowledge about protective factors have strengthened during recent years, and the balance of high risk with whole population approaches to reducing risk for society will be considered.
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