Jesús Martínez-Gómez

Biography

Jesús Martínez-Gómez is from Ferndale, Washington. He earned his B.S. in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology from the University of Washington. At UW, he joined the lab of Dr. Verónica Di Stilio, where he became fascinated by the diversity of plant forms and learned how to be a scientist. Realizing he could pursue a career in science, he joined the McNair Scholars Program, which helped him gain admission to graduate school. He completed his Ph.D. in Plant Biology at Cornell University in the lab of Dr. Chelsea Specht. There, he continued to study plant diversity, developing an interest in inflorescences (flowering branches) and phylogenetic comparative methods. He conducted postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley, as both an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in Biology and a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, working in the lab of Dr. Benjamin Blackman with co-advising from Dr. Yun Song. His research focuses on the developmental genetic basis of two important life history traits in monkeyflowers: floral ultraviolet pigmentation patterns and cold tolerance plasticity.

Research

A key goal in biology is to link genotypic variation to phenotypic variation. While significant progress has been made for many plant structures and species, we still lack a predictive framework for linking genotype to phenotype across diverse lineages. Using an evo-devo approach, we ask: how do phenotypes mechanistically arise from genotypes at the individual level? Using a phylogenetic comparative framework, we ask: how have traits evolved and contributed to species diversification? Our current research focuses on two interrelated areas: (1) developing a phylogenetic framework for the monkeyflower clade (Phrymaceae) to understand how trait evolution has driven diversification, and (2) studying inflorescence architecture across flowering plants to better characterize homology. We also pursue smaller projects on the evo-devo of underground storage organs and floral traits.