Hi everyone! My name is Lila Maladesky and I am doing my PhD on sex determination of Wikstroemia sp., a genus of flowering plants from Hawai’i. I work with Colin Olito and Bengt Hansson. In my project, I am investigating the evolution of dioecy (separate sexes) in this genus. In particular, I want to understand the genetic basis of the trait. For this, I’m trying to find the sex chromosomes in several species and compare them.
I grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina and I did my bachelor’s in Biology at the University of Buenos Aires. There, I worked for some time on cytogenetics of new-world primates. Since then, I have been passionate about chromosomes, and specially, sex chromosomes, because of the crazy systems that these monkeys have. After that, I moved to Europe to do my master’s in the Erasmus Mundus Master Program in Evolutionary Biology (MEME). During this time, I had the chance to live both in Uppsala, Sweden, and in Montpellier, France. During my master’s, I got to work in different projects, but all of them, you guessed it… connected to sex chromosomes. In this case, in arthropods. This is also when I started diving into genomics. Now, I made the brave decision of switching systems to plants, which present an amazing opportunity to keep working on a topic that I love, but from a new and fresh perspective.
Other than biology, I love history, and I am always eager to read books or watch movies about my favorite topics. I also enjoy reading fiction, dancing, hiking and running. But mostly, I would say, I love travelling. I’ve been lucky enough to travel quite a lot already, but I hope to do more of that, and to keep exploring Sweden over the next few years.
