Congratulations to Dr Berta Verd, who has been accepted into the EMBO Young Investigator Programme. Berta joins a new cohort of 28 group leaders on the programme which supports life scientists, allowing her to join an international network of more than 800 current and former EMBO Young Investigators, Installation Grantees, and Global Investigators.
Berta’s research focuses on one of the fundamental and most longstanding questions in biology: how phenotypes evolve to generate the incredible diversity of forms that surround us in the natural world. She focuses on vertebrate body shape diversity, a good example of this, with species’ ranging from the rounded ocean sunfish to elongated snakes, and everything in between.
As vertebrate body shapes have evolved, so have core parts of their skeletons including the vertebrae that make up spinal column which vary significantly in size, shape, and type – but perhaps most astonishingly, also in number, ranging from less than 10 to several hundred.
Berta’s group take an interdisciplinary approach to uncover the developmental drivers of this diversity using Lake Malawi cichlid fishes, an example of a rapid adaptive radiation which have evolved a wide range of vertebral counts over very short evolutionary timescales with very limited genetic diversity.
Berta says:
“I am delighted to become a part of the EMBO community and look forward to contributing and making the most of this amazing opportunity.”
