Juan Santos, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor

Dr. Santos comes to St. John's University as an Assistant Professor in the Biological Sciences department.  He earned a Ph.D. in ecology, evolution, and behavior and an M.S. in statistics from the University of Texas at Austin. Before joining St. John's University, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University, at the University of British Columbia (Canada), and at Brigham Young University.  Dr. Santos' research interests include the origin and modeling of biological diversity from evolutionary and ecological perspectives using bioinformatics tools.  His studies are centered on the evolution of complex phenotypes, genomic and transcriptomic diversity, and modeling ecophysiology. 

His focal groups of interest are the ectotherms (mostly amphibians and reptiles).  He has done extensive fieldwork in Tropical America and has active collaborations with researchers in the United States and abroad.  In the future, he hopes to find efficient computational algorithms to make sense of the growing biological knowledge revived from large genomic, phenotypic, climatological, and ecophysiological data.