José Aguilar-Rodríguez

José is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Petrov and Jarosz labs (2018-now). His research aims to elucidate how genotypes map onto phenotypes and fitness in diverse biological systems — and endeavor with important consequences for evolution, development, and disease. This is a research goal broad enough as to capture many of the genetic and evolutionary phenomena which he finds especially fascinating such as robustness, evolvability, epistasis, pleiotropy, phenotypic heterogeneity, gene expression noise, or protein mistranslation. In his research, José incorporates the mechanistic perspective of systems and cell biology into an evolutionary framework. During his PhD in the lab of Andreas Wagner at the University of Zurich he studied empirical adaptive landscapes and genotype-phenotype maps, the role of molecular chaperones in protein evolution, and the metabolic determinants of enzyme evolution. José received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation and a Long-Term Fellowship from the European Molecular Biology Organization to work at Stanford. During his postdoc, José studies how the fitness effects of mutations in signaling pathways that control cell proliferation change with the environment and the genetic background. He also investigates how the mapping of genotypes to phenotypes and fitness can be modified by proteins that are highly connected in the molecular networks of a cell. To do so, he combines computational approaches and quantitative genetics with cutting-edge techniques for genome editing and high-resolution lineage tracking, which are revolutionizing the experimental study of evolution.