Ulises Hernández
PhD Student
I'm a graduate student in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology program. I have a BS in Biophysics, and a MSc in Mathematical modeling. I am interested in studying the structure and properties of the genotype-phenotype map of biological systems and how these properties shape the outcomes of evolutionary processes. Such properties include robustness, modularity and plasticity. Currently, I'm working on understanding how the constant appearance of mutations affects populations over time and whether epistasis patterns, compatible with empirical data, can decrease the degradation of a population and thus decrease its extinction risk.
Publications :
Mawass W, Hernández U, Matheson JD, Masel J. (2024) Extinction vortices are partially driven by a shortage of beneficial mutations, rather than by deleterious mutation accumulation alone, bioRxiv.
Hernández, U., Posadas-Vidales, L., & Espinosa-Soto, C. (2021). On the effects of the modularity of gene regulatory networks on phenotypic variability and its association with robustness. Biosystems, 212, 104586. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biosystems.2021.104586
Espinosa‐Soto, C., Hernández, U., & Posadas‐García, Y. S. (2021). Recombination facilitates genetic assimilation of new traits in gene regulatory networks. Evolution & Development, 23(1), 459–473. https://doi.org/10.1111/ede.12391
Levis, M., Kumar, N., Apakian, E., Moreno, C., Hernandez, U., Olivares, A., Ontiveros, F., & Zartman, J. J. (2019). Microfluidics on the fly: Inexpensive rapid fabrication of thermally laminated microfluidic devices for live imaging and multimodal perturbations of multicellular systems. Biomicrofluidics, 13(2), 024111. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5086671