José Cerca
Researcher at Naturhistoriska riksmuseet
Oslo, Sweden
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJosé Cerca is an evolutionary genomics researcher and group leader with a decade of experience using genetic and environmental data to unravel island biodiversity dynamics. Trained in Biology and Ecology at the University of Coimbra and with a PhD from the University of Oslo, he has held postdoctoral and visiting positions at NTNU and UC Berkeley and now leads research at the Swedish Museum of Natural History. His work spans plants, birds, reptiles and spiders across island systems (Galápagos, Cabo Verde, Canary Islands, Hawai'i, Indo-Pacific), including sequencing projects that contributed to cataloguing Norway’s eukaryotic diversity. José combines hands-on molecular lab skills and bioinformatics (Bash, Python, R, SQL) with extensive fieldwork and science communication, mentoring early-career researchers along the way. Equally interested in research practice and research politics, he brings a pragmatic, interdisciplinary approach to questions of diversification and adaptive radiation. An early-career leader who grew up in Portugal’s mountains, he uniquely bridges rigorous genomics with public-facing outreach.
10 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Evolutionary Genomics and Zoology, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Evolutionary Genomics and Zoology at Universitetet i Oslo (UiO)Master's degree, Ecology, 19/20, Master's degree, Ecology, 19/20 at Universidade de CoimbraEscola Secundária da Sé
Portuguese, English, Spanish, Italian
Github Skills (11)
assembly4
bioinformatics4
genomics3
comparative-genomics2
evolution2
genome-assembly2
pipeline2
annotations2
inference2
protein-sequences1
genome-annotation1
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
jcerca/jcerca.github.io
Sep 2019 - Feb 2025
Github Pages template for academic personal websites, forked from mmistakes/minimal-mistakes
Contributions:258 pushes in 5 years 5 months
templategithub-pages-templatemmistakesmistakesjekyll
KamilSJaron/k-mer-approaches-for-biodiversity-genomics
Sep 2021 - Sep 2021
k-mer learning materials
Contributions:18 commits, 2 PRs, 18 pushes in 1 day
workshop
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