Susana A. Magallón Puebla

Magallón is an evolutionary biologist who focuses on understanding macroevolutionary processes associated to the evolution of flowering plants, including their floral structure, the timing and dynamics of their diversification, and the mechanisms of acquisition of species richness in diverse Mesoamerican lineages. She obtained her B.Sc. and M.SC. degrees from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Davis. Her research is characterized by a deep understanding and integration of paleobiology and of phylogenetic comparative methods, involving the combination of morphological and molecular data from extant and fossil species. Her main contributions include a method-of-moments to estimate the rate of lineage diversification; the timing of origin and radiation of flowering plants and their main lineages derived from rigorously fossil-calibrated molecular clocks; an estimate of the structural attributes of the ancestral flower; and the identification of significant diversification increases and decreases across the angiosperm tree of life. She was president of the Society of Systematic Biologists (2017 – 2019), and is an editor of the Evolution section of the New Phytologist journal. She is senior research scientist and Director of the Institute of Biology at UNAM. As Director, she oversees the curation and digitization of the national biological collections of Mexico.