Lab Team

Study of the human impact on marine ecosystems through fishing and pollution. Ecological modeling against overfishing, physical impact on substrates and biocenosis, loss of biodiversity. Satellite data, eDNA, statistics and artificial intelligence in my toolbox. Innate nerd and math/computer science lover

I am an aquatic ecologist with research interest spanning marine coastal ecosystems to shallow and volcanic lakes. My work primarily focus on community level responses of fish to environment stressors such as anthropogenic pressure, natural disturbance and biological invasions. I received a Ph.D. form University of Rome “La Sapienza” 2019, and undertook Post-Doctoral research at Water Research institute of Italian National research council (CNR-IRSA) until 2021. I use stable isotopes (SI), niche and diet analysis as well as quantitative ecology to examine the trophic mechanisms through which environmental changes modify aquatic community structure and ecosystems functioning.

I am a marine biologist particularly interested in all the aspects related to biodiversity and conservation! I’m currently doing a PhD which aims to investigate the possibility of using DNA metabarcoding to reconstruct the composition of catches obtained from bottom-trawl fishing vessels. I am working on the Mediterranean Sea and the final goal of my project is to associate novel monitoring methods based on eDNA metabarcoding with the activity of fishermen at sea to have a more comprehensive understanding of the distribution of species across the oceans in order to implement management policies to reverse the stock depletion and moving towards more sustainable fishing practices.

I am interested in marine ecology and applied sciences. My PhD research focuses on the impacts of plastics in demersal communities exploited by fishing, combining ecological models based on: diet analysis of marine species, scientific surveys, and examination of long-term datasets. My work is dedicated to assessing and predicting the effect of disturbances on the functioning of marine ecosystems.

My main research interest focuses on the improvement of our knowledge on fisheries temporal and spatial dynamics. With this information we can improve the management and sustainable use of our Seas. I am very interested on answering questions like “Where are we fishing?”, “How many gears and how many kms of gears do we have fishing at a given time?”, “How long does fishing gears stay in the water while fishing?”. I am also very curious about the spatial and temporal patterns of fisheries catches as this knowledge is paramount to improve the sustainable management and even conservation of marine species. In order to explore these ideas and to try to answer these questions. Data science, modellng and machine learning techniques are the most suitable tools to explore and answer the aforementioned ideas and questions. Which is why I am also very excited and passionate about these “geek-ish” skills

Master Degree in Biological Science