Faculty Profiles

Raúl A. González-Pech is an Assistant Professor at Texas State University. He earned his BSc in Biology from the Autonomous University of Nuevo Leon (UANL), Mexico, in 2013. As part of a one-year academic exchange program sponsored by UANL and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), he conducted his undergraduate thesis on coral genetics at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. From 2013 to 2015, he completed an MSc in Evolution, Ecology, and Systematics at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich, Germany, supported by a joint scholarship from the Mexican Council for Science, Technology and Innovation (CONACyT) and DAAD. His master’s research examined gene expression changes in corals and their algal symbionts in response to low pH conditions. In 2020, Dr. González-Pech earned his PhD from The University of Queensland, Australia, funded by the university’s Centennial Scholarship and International Postgraduate Research Scholarship. His doctoral work investigated the mechanisms of genome evolution in coral symbionts and their adaptation to a symbiotic lifestyle. Following his PhD, he worked as a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of South Florida, where he continued using genomic approaches to study invertebrate-algal symbioses. He later joined The Pennsylvania State University as an Eberly Postdoctoral Research Fellow, expanding his research to explore the roles of microbial communities, beyond algal symbionts, in the evolution and ecology of corals and other invertebrates.
Dr. González-Pech joined Texas State University in Fall 2025, where he is establishing the Microbial Symbiosis Laboratory.

Dr. González-Pech and his team study how marine and freshwater holobionts—animals and the microbes they closely associate with —evolve, diversify, and respond to environmental conditions. They use cutting-edge genomic approaches to explore how these partnerships shape the biology of both hosts and symbionts. Their work primarily centers on zooxanthellate invertebrates, which harbor symbiotic dinoflagellates from the family Symbiodiniaceae, but it is currently expanding to include Hydra and its algal symbionts.

Genomics, Bioinformatics, Microbial Symbiosis, Coral Reefs