Dr. Joseph Heras is an evolutionary biologist keenly interested in the genetic mechanisms that facilitate evolutionary adaptation. He attended UCRiverside for undergrad, CSULA for his masters, and UCMerced for his Ph.D. Joe works in the Donovan German lab (Dept. of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology) and recently attended the 2016 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting in Portland Oregon to present a poster on his current research entitled “The monkeyface prickleback (Cebidichthys violaceus) genome: a source for understanding biology in a complex environment.” The American Physiological Society also recently supported his travel to attend a course in Vietnam on the physiology of native fishes in Mekong Delta, and the impact of environmental conditions on the adaptive traits of these fishes. As part of the course, he was able to co-author a manuscript based on his research in Vietnam entitled “Ambient CO2, fish behaviour and altered GABAergic neurotransmission: exploring the mechanism of CO2-altered behaviour by taking a hypercapnia dweller down to low CO2 levels,” which was featured as an editors’ choice in the Journal of Experimental Biology.