Mariana Pires Braga

I was born in a Brazilian city surrounded by mountains covered by the Atlantic Forest. My interest in nature and research came quite late, so I always say that I am lucky that 17-old me chose to study Biology. During my masters, I became fascinated by ecological networks (how species interact with each other) and phylogenetic trees (how species are related to each other). I started studying Neotropical freshwater fishes and their ectoparasites. Once I moved to Stockholm to do a PhD, I started studying butterflies and their host plants. In 2019, I defended a PhD thesis on the evolution of butterfly-plant interactions. After a postdoctoral period in the US, I did a second postdoc in Sweden and Finland. In January 2025 I started my own research group at SLU, the Evolving Networks Lab (evonetslab) where we study a variety of topics in Ecology and Evolution, but butterflies are still my favorite study group.

Research in the Evolving Networks Lab centers around understanding how species interactions change over time and space, with a focus on caterpillar-plant interactions and development of phylogenetic methods.