Short biography

Patrizia Ziveri is an ICREA Research Professor and Scientific Director of the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) Center of Excellence ‘María de Maeztu’at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). She started to work on marine global change in the 1990’s during her PhD dissertation at the Univ. of Padua (Italy), and Univ. of South Carolina (USA), focusing on the impacts of El Niño climate oscillations on calcareous phytoplankton in the Eastern Pacific. After a postdoc at USC, she moved to the Vrije Univ. Amsterdam, The Netherlands, first as a researcher then as associate professor/senior scientist. She joined ICREA in 2014. She coordinates the Marine and Environmental Biogeosciences Research Group  (MERS) that catalyzes research on the natural and human-driven marine processes addressing major marine global change and sustainability challenges.

Research interests

Global environmental change on marine ecosystems, ecology, and biogeochemistry at various time scales and complexity is a key theme of her research group, focusing on multidisciplinary investigation of marine calcifying organisms at the base of the food web. With her work on the ocean in a changing climate and under human pressure, she is linking CO₂ dynamics, climate change and target marine processes and systems. Interest on pressing threats to the marine environment and their societal relevance has led to developing research on ocean acidification, warming and oxygen loss in different regions. The study of marine litter and the cycle of marine microplastics is another research area in her group and a new clean laboratory for microplastic studies opened recently at ICTA-UAB. These interactive global and local change processes alter the marine systems affecting economic activities and human welfare.

Key words

climate and global change, high CO2 ocean, calcifying plankton, marine micropaleontology, biogeochemistry, marine microplastics