We are very happy to welcome our new Writing-up Fellow Marta Gomez-Recio to the KLI. Marta is currently a PhD student working with Markus Bastir and Benoit Beyer at the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Spain, where she investigates human respiratory kinematics and their relationship to torso morphology.

Marta received her Bachelors’ degree in Biology from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid with a thesis that explored cranial disparity in mammals from a macroevolutionary perspective. During her Master’s in Paleontology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Marta became more interested in human ecology and evolution, and started to delve into how the evolution of the respiratory system could have influenced the development of new subsistence strategies such as persistence hunting. This query led to a more focussed enquiry on the functional morphology of the human respiratory system which developed into her PhD dissertation.

At the KLI, Marta’s project, “From Shape to Function: Evolutionary Dynamics of Human Breathing through 4D Geometric Morphometrics” aims to explore the relationship between torso shape and breathing kinematics in modern humans, with an emphasis on its evolutionary significance.

Marta will be Writing-up Fellow at the KLI from 1^st April to 30^th September 2025.

We wish Marta a wonderful time at the KLI!