I earned an MSc in Archaeology at the Archaeological Studies Program of the University of the Philippines and in my MSc thesis I looked at the subsistence economy of early farming groups in Northern Philippines and the roles that domestic animals played in their societies. 

I then worked as a research associate at the University of the Philippines for a couple of years and was involved in various research projects including those looking at animal husbandry in Neolithic Vietnam, lifeways of hunter-foragers that lived in Mindoro and Palawan Islands (Philippines) ca. 15,000-5000 years ago, agricultural intensification and craft specialization in pre-capitalist Northern Philippines and 16th-19th century fortified settlements in East Timor, among others. 

I obtained my PhD at the French National Museum of Natural History (Muséum national d'histoire naturelle) and the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució). My dissertation, drawing on themes of zooarchaeology, paleoecology and taphonomy, looked at human subsistence economies and hunting strategies in Eastern Java (Indonesia) during the Late Pleistocene to the Mid-Holocene (ca. 30,000-7,000 years ago), a time of dramatic climatic and environmental change. With the onset of the Holocene period (ca. 11,700 years ago), the subsistence economies of communities in the region shifted from reliance on hunting large animals such as pigs, deer and wild cattle to the capture of small fauna, particularly monkeys. 

In the same year that I finished my PhD, I started a postdoctoral research position at the Department of Archaeology in the then-Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. My postdoc project looked at paleoecology and prehistoric occupation of cave sites in the rainforests of western Sri Lanka, specifically on the deliberate targeting of arboreal, difficult to capture preys (monkeys and squirrels) by humans that were present in the island starting ca. 50,000 using bone and arrow technology (the earliest documented outside Africa). 

In addition, I was involved in other projects in Gobi-Altai (Mongolia), Eastern Sulawesi (Indonesia), Palawan (Philippines) and Kenya (the discovery of what is so far the earliest human burial in Africa). 

 I was also part of the team, led by researchers from the French National Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of the Philippines, that discovered the earliest evidence of hominin activity in the Philippines. The team discovered stone tools and a partially complete rhinoceros skeleton (assigned as belonging to a new genus) that showed evidence of butchery in a sediment bed dated to ca. 700 thousand years ago. 

My ongoing research focuses on human-animal interactions during important periods of transitions in human history in different parts of the world. I’m also interested in exploring the utility of zooarchaeological data in guiding current wildlife conservation efforts, particularly in biodiversity hotspots in Southeast Asia.

Among many ongoing projects, I'm a collaborator in the ERC-funded PANTROPOCENE project which aims to study pre-colonial and colonial land-use impacts on tropical forests in the former Spanish Empire. Specifically, I’m interested in the environmental impacts of translocation to the Philippine Archipelago of animal and plant species from the Neotropics during the Spanish colonial period. I also recently joined the Togolok Archaeological Project, which investigates one of the most important Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) sites (located in southern Turkmenistan). I’m also currently looking at fauna from cave sites in Madagascar to evaluate shifts in endemic faunal composition following the introduction of human commensal rodent species to the island. 

In addition to these, I’m currently co-leading archaeological field projects in Southern Armenia, where we are looking at a Late Chalcolithic-Early Bronze Age site, and in Eastern Zambia where we are excavating Early to Late Iron Age villages and rock shelter sites.