Dr. Juli Caujapé-Castells is the director of the Jardín Botánico “Viera y Clavijo”-Unidad Asociada de I+D+I al CSIC, a research division of the Cabildo de Gran Canaria devoted to the conservation of the Canarian and Macaronesian terrestrial floras through the knowledge furnished by multi-disciplinary science. He is also the co-chair of the IUCN Macaronesian Islands Plant Specialist Group since 2017.
With a strong background in population genetics and molecular phylogenetics, he uses the information contained in the molecule of DNA in an inter-disciplinary and creative context to investigate problems related to the floras from Macaronesia and other insular enclaves. He has published more than 150 papers on plant conservation genetics, phylogeny, phylogeography, and bioinformatics, and he has been the founder and catalyst of the activity of the Department of Molecular Biodiversity and DNA Bank of the Canarian flora since their origins in the early 2000s. He has directed five PhD theses, he collaborates actively with more than 20 international research institutions, and he has led 21 research projects focused on insular floras, most of them international. The problems of his utmost interest are:
- To better understand the origins, relationships, post-colonizing evolution, diversity, bio-geographic links and conservation of the current Canarian flora.
- To integrate DNA banking and molecular data in multi-disciplinary approaches to taxonomy.
- To help formulate conservation objectives for insular plant endemics worldwide, fostering pattern generalization beyond single cases.
- To promote public awareness of biodiversity research & education developed in Botanic Gardens.
- To facilitate the storage, analysis and meta-analysis of any kind of genetic diversity data.