Biodiversity conservation with a focus on freshwater fishes is Dr. Jimena Golcher-Benavides’ key interest. She teaches Aquatic Ecosystems and mentors students pursuing aquatic research in the Great Lakes region or abroad in Costa Rica. Jimena is passionate about undergraduate education, and specifically about incorporating experience-based learning into science education.

Her Hope College research team focuses on why some freshwater ecosystems readily accumulate diversity. She pursues this question from different angles and focuses on groups of freshwater fishes that have diversified rapidly relative to other vertebrates. Her research team will involve bio monitoring tools, proof-of-concept experiments involving behavioral observations, and comparative anatomy using museum specimens. Students in her lab will also gain experience with standard molecular lab techniques and bioinformatic tools used to inform conservation efforts.

Following her graduate work, Jimena conducted undergraduate-led research in Appalachian mountain streams near Lees-McRae College in North Carolina, where she taught for a year. She also continued research in Lake Tanganyika, Tanzania with collaborators at the Tanzanian Fisheries Institute, The Nature Conservancy, and the University of Wyoming, before serving as a fisheries research scientist as part of the Natural Resource Ecology and Management Department at Iowa State University. As a fisheries researcher, she focused her research on population dynamics of two invasive carp species that were introduced in the early 1980s in the Mississippi River Basin. She joined Hope's Department of Biology in 2024.

AREAS OF Expertise

• Tropical fish ecology
• Aquatic ecosystems
• Evolutionary ecology
• Computational biology

EDUCATION

• Ph.D., ecology, University of Wyoming, 2021
• M.Sc., biological sciences, University of Konstanz, Germany, 2015
• B.S., biological sciences, UNA, Costa Rica, 2011

Selected Publications

• “Reference Genome Choice and Filtering Thresholds Jointly Influence Phylogenomic Analyses,” with J. A. Rick et al., Systematic Biology, 2024
• “Environmental DNA in the Classroom: A Case Study,” Center for Teaching and Learning Digging Deeper, 2023
• “Seasonal Patterns of Dietary Partitioning in Vertebrates,” with C. K. Porter and C. W. Benkman, Ecology Letters, 2022
• “Variable Hybridization between Two Lake Tanganyikan Cichlid Species in Recent Secondary Contact,” with A. L. Lewanski et al., Molecular Ecology, 2022
• “Ecological and Evolutionary Drivers of Fish Community Diversity in Lake Tanganyika,” dissertation, University of Wyoming, 2021
• “Playing out Liem’s Paradox: Opportunistic Piscivory across Lake Tanganyikan Cichlids,” with C. E. Wagner, American Naturalist, 2019
• “The Role of Rare Morph Advantage and Conspicuousness in the Stable Gold-dark Colour Polymorphism of a Crater Lake Midas Cichlid Fish,” with J. Torres-Dowdall, Journal of Animal Ecology, 2017

Outside the College

Jimena loves scuba diving and cooking. She is married to Dr. Cody K. Porter, who also is a faculty member in the Hope College Department of Biology. You will often find them hiking around Holland with their dogs, Phoebe and Tulio.