Eugenio Azpeitia

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I am a biologist from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México with a special interest in developmental biology and evolution. Development has continuously amazed me. In my opinion, development is the result of many processes at different scales, like gene regulatory networks that produce different gene configurations over time and space, morphogenes that dynamically move from different cellular location, physical forces that constrain and allow different cell and organism morphologies, environmental signals constantly changing at micro and macroscopic levels, among other things. However, in my academic career I started a working in behavioral biology and then in ecophysiology and biological rhythms. Finally, I changed to mathematical and computational approaches to study development, mostly in plants.

I got really interested in theoretical approaches to development. Consequently, during the last 6 or 7 years I have been studying and modeling the development of biological systems at different organization levels. I have been especially focused on the molecular mechanisms of development, but I am starting to explore how developmental processes and morphologies could change over evolutionary time and how they can respond to environmental signals in a robust and plastic way. At the beginning I worked exclusively modeling gene regulatory network with different approaches, but recently I started to use 2D and 3D modeling as well, which I believe are a great tool to study some of the questions I am interested in.