Advisory Board and Editors Marine Biology
Alfonso Aguilar-Perera
Dr. Alfonso Aguilar-Perera is Professor at Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, Mexico. He is a marine biologist focused on studying marine fish associated with coral reefs, in particular Groupers and Snappers, and more recently Lionfish, on the coasts of the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. He has also addressed the biological and ecological components of sea cucumbers, corals, and parasitic isopods of fishes.
Susana Agusti
Dr. Susana Agusti is Professor of Marine Science at KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) at the Red Sea Research Center, and Adjunct Professor at the University of Tromsø (Norway).
She holds Bachelors and Ph.D. degrees from the Autonomous University of Madrid.
Formerly she was Research Professor with the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), and Professorial Fellow with the UWA Oceans Institute and the School of Plant Biology at the University of Western Australia (Australia).
Anastazia T Banaszak
Research Professor at the Unidad Académica de Sistemas Arrecifales (Reef Systems Academic Unit) a campus of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México located in Puerto Morelos in the Mexican Caribbean. Her undergraduate education was at James Cook University, Townsville, Australia followed by her graduate degree at the University of California at Santa Barbara, USA and a postdoctoral appointment at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, Maryland, USA.
Her research interests include the photobiology of phytoplankton, corals and coral reef dwelling-organisms as well as coral reproductive biology and ecology. Most recently, she has become involved in research on best practices for culturing coral species for use in restoration projects.
She is a topic editor for Coral Reefs, council member of the International Society for Reef Studies and serves on the scientific advisory boards for the Healthy Reefs Initiative and SECORE International and is on the steering committees of the Coral Restoration Consortium and the Meso-American Reef Restoration Group.
Brian L Beatty
Dr. Brian Beatty is a comparative anatomist, paleobiologist at New York Institute of Technology. He is especially interested in convergent/unique evolution of aquatic amniotes to similar physiological constraints, as well as surface metrology and its relationship to underlying microstructure of bone, skin, and endothelia.
Michael Beman
The overarching goal of my research program is to develop a predictive understanding of microbial ecology and biogeochemistry in the ‘Anthropocene’ sea. My research sits at the interface of microbial ecology, biogeochemistry, and global change science, and I work worldwide in reefs and estuaries, marine lakes and mountain lakes, and the open ocean. I focus on the responses of microbial communities, and the processes mediated by these communities, to environmental change—including climate change, ocean acidification, and ocean deoxygenation.
I received a B.S. from Yale University and a Ph.D. from Stanford in Geological and Environmental Sciences; before joining the UC Merced faculty in 2009, where I was a postdoc in Marine Environmental Biology at USC, a lecturer at UCLA, and an Assistant Researcher at the University of Hawai’i. I am an Associate Professor and member of the Sierra Nevada Research Institute and the Environmental Systems and Quantitative and Systems Biology graduate groups.
Mark C. Benfield
Professor in the Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences, College of the Coast and Environment at Louisiana State University. Adjunct (Guest Investigator) in the Biology Department at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Member and Past-Chair of the ICES Working Group on Zooplankton Ecology, member of the ICES Working Group on Integrated Morphological and Molecular Taxonomy, Director of the Gulf SERPENT Project. Ph.D. (Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences) from Texas A&M University.
John A Berges
Professor in Biological Sciences and Freshwater Sciences. PhD Biological Oceanography, U. British Columbia. Postdoctoral work, Brookhaven National Laboratory. Fellow of the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography. Research interests include marine and freshwater phytoplankton and zooplankton ecophysiology and biochemistry, including molecular (e.g. evolution of cell death proteases) and biomathematical (e.g. agent-based modelling) approaches.
Angelo F Bernardino
PhD in Biological Oceanography and Associate Professor of Oceanography at Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo, Brazil. Interested in Marine Biology, Marine Ecology, Deep-Sea Biology and Conservation, Estuarine ecology, Biological Oceanography, Climate change impacts on marine ecosystems.
Punyasloke Bhadury
I study microbial complexity (biocomplexity) across coastal oceans to understand how ocean geochemistry has shaped plasticity and consequences for key ecosystem processes such as carbon and nitrogen cycling. I am particularly interested to address the link between land-ocean-atmosphere in shaping microbial complexity across oceanic realms. I also have keen interests in metazoan biogeography, biomonitoring of aquatic ecosystems and elucidating resilience in microbes. I use geochemical, microscopy and molecular tools (e.g. eDNA, genomics) to address these questions.
Gorka Bidegain
Gorka Bidegain (GB) is a Senior Lecturer of the University of the Basque Country at the Department of Applied Mathematics. His main research interests lie within marine ecological and population dynamics modelling, including disease ecology and pathogen transmission. He conducts laboratory/field experiments and uses advanced mathematical and computational ecological modelling techniques to identify and asses the population and ecosystem responses to pressures and ecological and environmental heterogeneities. GB is developing new models, methodologies and algorithms with implications for the understanding of how climate variability interacts with marine populations and host-pathogen systems.
GB has participated in more than 20 national and international R&D competitive projects including three EU projects and three National Science Foundation (NSF). GB has published more than 25 articles in top rank peer reviewed journals, 3 book chapters, several scientific/technical reports and open access computer codes and Graphical User Interface for disease modelling (R, Matalab).
He is member of the Ecology of Infectious Marine Diseases Research Coordination Network (EIMD-RCN) (Cornell University, USA). He is also member of the Marine Biological Association and the Estuarine and Coastal Sciences Association
Rüdiger Bieler
Curator (research professor) in the Integrative Research Center, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago and Member of the Committee on Evolutionary Biology, University of Chicago
Research interests include evolutionary systematics, biogeography, comparative morphology, and taxonomy, with special focus on marine Mollusca, especially Gastropoda and Bivalvia. As a “museum person,” he is particularly interested in the development and application of organismal, collections-based research, ranging from extensive new field surveys and large-scale specimen and data management issues, to the integration of morphological, paleontological, and molecular data to address biological research questions. He recently served as lead PI of the Bivalve Assembling-the-Tree-of-Life (BivAToL.org) effort and is involved in coral reef restoration projects and associated invertebrate surveys in the Florida Keys. Past offices include service as president of the American Malacological Society and of the International Society of Malacology (Unitas), and he currently a member of the steering committee of WoRMS (marinespecies.org) and a chief editor in the MolluscaBase.org effort.
Andreu Blanco Cartagena
Dr. Andreu Blanco is a Project Officer at Centro Tecnológico del Mar, Fundación CETMAR. His research focus is on environmental and anthropogenic disturbances on marine management and conservation. Dr. Blanco has a strong background on trophic webs, marine protected areas, invasive species and species conservation actions (monitoring, rearing and repopulation).