Sofía Esquenazi – Ecological & Conservation Genomics Lab

Sofía Esquenazi
PhD Student
Email: mvesquenazi@gmail.com

Education

PhD in Veterinary Science, University of Buenos Aires (in progress)
Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (DVM), Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto (2022)

Research Interests

Using genomic tools to inform wildlife conservation management
One Health approach to ecosystem health
eDNA Metabarcoding for biodiversity and microbiome monitoring

Projects

Conservation genomics of Lowland Tapir (Tapirus terrestris) in Argentina
Vertebrate community assessment via eDNA metabarcoding

Publications

Mapelli, F.J., Esquenazi, S.M., Teta, P., Austrich, A., Kittlein, M.J., Pereyra, D., Tammone, M.N., Mora, M.S (2024). Stuck between rivers: a new species of Ctenomys from northern Argentine Patagonia. Journal of Mammalian Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10914-024-09737-0

Lab News

January 2026
Mike has been elected to the American Genetics Association Council, an organization that dates back to 1903 and that has disseminated achievements in genetics through the Journal of Heredity for over 100 years. Welcome to Sofía Esquenazi, a visiting PhD student from Argentina who will be pursuing a population genomic study of lowland tapirs with funding support from the Government of Canada’s Emerging Leaders in the Americas Program and the Mitacs Globalink Research Internship program.

December 2025
Congratulations to PhD candidate Anna Jacquemart for being awarded the Exeter-UBCO Sustainability and Resilience Partnership – Visiting Research Student Fellowship. Anna was also recognized by the I.K. Barber Faculty of Science for her recent publication in Evolutionary Applications .

October 2025
Welcome to Molly Garrett and Danielle Schmidt, new postdoctoral researchers in the ECGL. A new paper published in Molecular Ecology investigates patterns of climate-mediated adaptive genetic variation and predicts the degree of genomic offset under multiple climate change scenarios for a sentinel alpine mammal.

September 2025
Welcome to Lee Fenuccio and Tate Linden, two new MSc students in the ECGL. Silke Schonekess, BSc Honours student, presented a poster at the annual NSERC USRA symposium detailing her summer research in the ECGL testing a novel genomic approach to inform Coho salmon fisheries management, work she will continue to pursue for her BSc honours thesis.

August 2025
A new paper published in Evolutionary Applications demonstrates a novel application of genomic offsets for informing freshwater fisheries management under climate change.

June 2025
Olivia Boven successfully defended her MSc thesis entitled “A spatio-temporal investigation of sockeye-kokanee hybridization in the Okanagan Basin, British Columbia, Canada “. Congratulations, Olivia!