Martim Melo is interested in the processes that generate biodiversity. His research focuses on bird diversification on the oceanic and ecological islands of Africa. He has worked on the Gulf of Guinea islands for over a decade, where he did his MSc (University of Cape Town) and PhD (University of Edinburgh). He also works on the Cape Verde archipelago and he was privileged to be able to look into another fascinating ‘big-bill/small-bill’ system: the Tristan Buntings from Inaccessible and Nightingale islands (with Peter Ryan). He is now extending his research into the Afromontane centers of endemism on the mainland.

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Martin is a Swedish Marie Curie research fellow at the Natural History Museum in Tring/London (hosted by, Alex Bond, one of the queer Twitter ornithologists he stumbled upon!), where he combines historical museum specimens and modern genomics to figure out whether the repeated convergent evolution of flight loss in island rails followed the same molecular pathways. He is also an associate editor of Ibis, and the managing editor of Ornis Svecica.

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