Christina Toft

Dr. Christina Toft is a tenured researcher at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and leads a research group at the Institute for Integrative Systems Biology (I2SysBio). She holds a BSc in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics from the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, where she received two Gold Medals, and a PhD from Trinity College Dublin, where she investigated genomic adaptations in endosymbiotic bacteria. Her postdoctoral work includes studies on the evolution of Bartonella at Uppsala University and on yeast hybridization and evolutionary mechanisms in the Saccharomycetaceae family at the University of Valencia, supported by EMBO and JdC fellowships.
Dr. Christina Toft’s research explores the molecular mechanisms driving evolutionary innovation, with a focus on gene duplication, hybridization, and symbiosis. By combining theoretical models with experimental evolution, her work uncovers how these processes contribute to genetic robustness and biological complexity. Her group uses genomic tools such as NGS, comparative genomics, and genotype-to-phenotype analysis to investigate how evolutionary signatures translate into functional adaptations, particularly in yeast.