Israel Campo

September 2026-present

I first fell in love with evolution during my Bachelor’s degree in Biology at the University of Valencia. I then pursued an international Master’s Programme in Evolutionary Biology, during which I investigated the genetic basis and evolution of color polymorphism in stick insects at CEFE-CNRS (Patrik Nosil lab) and the evolution of toxin-antidote systems and the horizontal transfer of transposable elements in nematodes at IMBA-VBC (Alejandro Burga lab). I later completed a PhD in Manuel Irimia’s lab at the Centre for Genomic Regulation, where I used comparative transcriptomic and genomic approaches to investigate the evolution of zygotic genome activation across animals. As part of a collaborative project jointly led by Josefa González and Núria Flames, I am annotating transposable elements in nematode populations to investigate their potential impact on the evolution of neural tissue.