Max Willian got his PhD!

Posted by Joaquín Hortal | Dec 21, 2023 | English, News, Português, Teaching | 0 |

Max Willian Tavares de Almeida had his viva yesterday, 20th December. After a nice 5-hour defence by teleconference, he obtained his PhD in Ecology and Evolution at the Universidade Federal de Goiás.

Max’s thesis describes the shortfalls in the knowledge on the taxonomy and distribution of termites at a global scale. He related the gaps and biases in knowlege about this important group with several factors, such as economic development, academic capacity, or poiltical stability. Max was co-supervised by Joaquín Hortal and Juliana Stropp of the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (Madrid), and by José Alexandre Felizola Diniz-Filho at the Universidade Federal de Goiás. During his PhD Max endured the effects of the covid pandemic and the cuts in invesment on research of the former Brazilian government, so this is a great end of paragraph for his career. Some of Max’s great results will be published in the forthcoming months.

Parabéns Max!!!!

About The Author

Joaquín Hortal

I am a biogeographer with broad interests in macroecology, community ecology, island biogeography, insect ecology, evolution, and biodiversity research. My main research aim is to determine why biodiversity – and in particular community structure – is geographically distributed the way it is, and to identify the processes that domain the spatial and temporal dynamics of ecological assemblages. I work as Scientific Researcher at the Department of Biogeography and Global Change of the Natural History Museum in Madrid (MNCN), a research institute of the Spanish Scientific Council (CSIC). I am also External Professor at the Departamento de Ecologia of the Federal University of Goiás (UFG) in Brazil, and Associate Researcher of the Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Changes (cE3c) of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon in Portugal.