Eva Castells

I am a chemist ecologist specialized on secondary plant metabolism and toxic plants. I obtained the PhD in biology in 2002 at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and I have been a researcher at the University of Illinois a Urbana-Champaign (USA), the University of Alaska a Fairbanks (USA), the Centre d'Ecologie Fonctionelle et Evolutive (Montpellier, France) and the Faculty of Pharmacy of Universitat de Barcelona. Since 2008 I am a professor at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona teaching ecotoxicology and food toxicology, and I coordinate the Toxicology Unit of the Faculty of Veterinary where I lead the Research Group on Chemical Ecology and Toxicology.

The main goal of my research is to understand the evolution of plant chemistry in response to the biotic environment (e.g., herbivory) and the climate change, and their ecological consequences. I use environmental gradients and invasive plant species, including toxic plants, as models to study species adaptive responses to rapid environmental changes. I also study the plants adaptation and acclimation to drought from a metabolomics perspective.