I am an evolutionary biologist interested in understanding the speciation processes leading the modern species' diversity in amphibians and reptiles. For this, the primary task is to combine as many types of data as possible in a way that we can recover the history of one or many lineages (a clade) using different sources of information. Genetic and morphological data, including ecological and distributional information, are key to infer the past scenarios — circumstances — that drove the evolutionary divergence of populations, species, and potentially entire communities. In this context, oceanic islands and the organism that inhabit them are attractive study subjects because islands exhibit constrained time and spatial dimensions. Thus, in principle, it should be easier to infer the evolution and adaptation of lineages that successfully colonized one, or many, islands compared to organisms showing continental distributions. In effect, Charles Darwin's exceptional observation and abstraction capabilities led him to propose — after a brief visit to the Galápagos Archipelago — that natural selection was central to species origins and that species are not immutable. Islands and the organisms that inhabit them allow an unparalleled look into the contribution of distinct evolutionary forces in the origin of new species and sometimes help to establish the connection between past and present. Ultimately, whether one studies the evolution of vertebrates in islands or in mainland habitats, the invariable motivation is to recover biological history so we can understand the mechanisms that generate and maintain modern biodiversity. So, even ~150 years after of the publication of "On the origin of species...", we still trying to gauge the many processes that originate species diversity. The twigs and wigs of the Tree of Life. 

I am a Bolivian national. And, not too many people visit Bolivia. I hope you do one day. Crystal clear skies will surprise you. The picture above was taken in the Salar de Uyuni (Uyuni Salt flats) and it somehow embodies my country — pristine (mostly), vast and wild. So if you are lucky enough to go, you should not expect the standard hotel accommodations at the exit of every small town (you can go to Chile, Brazil or Argentina for that). Bolivia is rarely uneventful, but know that you'll be visiting the most authentic country in South America.