Juan Barreneche

Hello!

I come from Uruguay, toghether with Miguel_Ponce_de_Leon and Alvaro_Cabana, who are both good friends and colleagues in Facultad de Ciencias, where we study & work.

San Carlos de Bariloche it's a beautifull city (been there a couple of times), not to mention the nature that surrounds it. I can't wait to be there...

Interests

My main interest is Ecology, specially on levels from organisms to communities. More specifically, I'm interested in Food Webs, Population Dynamics, Invasive Species & Epidemiology, Ecophysiology and Behavior Ecology.

Being a field full of complex systems, I think it's only natural to be interested in it's thematics, so I have a lot of expectations from this summer school. I find very appealing the striking the amount of bridges between different disciplines that are built by this "new" science, the wide range of applications that are probably crucial for ourselves and even the beauty of it.

As a scientist, I consider important (and love) both empirical and theoretical approaches (which are obviously complementary and necessary in almost every field), even though I lean a little more for the later.

Present Work

I am currently working in a research project (*) which aims to draw the expected pattern of two biological invasions in my country (Bullfrog and Golden_Mussel), and it's effects on biodiversity and aquatic resources. My main role is to program and run the computer simulations involved, which consists in a stochastic, spatially-explicit and individual based model.

* Bioinvasions in freshwater ecosystems of Uruguay: analysis of its determinants, environmental consequences and future effects

Thesis

My degree thesis was focused on the same thematic as my current work, only oriented to ifectious diseases. My tutor was Matías Arim.

Programing

I have been working with R for about 4 years now, and recently I've learned & used some Perl for my work.