Research Group: MPB - Marine PalaeoBiogeography

CIBIO-Açores, the Research Center in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources – Azores, is based at the University of the Azores while constituting a research group of InBIO, the Research Network in Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology. In 2020 it included 92 researchers: 25 PhDs (11 professors, 1 principal researcher, 2 junior researchers and 11 post-doc fellows), 11 PhD students, 7 MSc students and 49 research fellows. In 2020 the center published 41 papers and managed to obtain funding at national and international levels. Since its establishment in 2006, the center is devoted to the development of high-level research in biodiversity using the Azores and other island systems as models. Its areas of activity span from coastal biotopes to natural and exotic forests but also include freshwater ecology, paleoecology, and paleontology.

CIBIO-Açores, the Research Center in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources – Azores, is based at the University of the Azores while constituting a research group of InBIO, the Research Network in Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology. In 2020 it included 92 researchers: 25 PhDs (11 professors, 1 principal researcher, 2 junior researchers and 11 post-doc fellows), 11 PhD students, 7 MSc students and 49 research fellows. In 2020 the center published 41 papers and managed to obtain funding at national and international levels. Since its establishment in 2006, the center is devoted to the development of high-level research in biodiversity using the Azores and other island systems as models. Its areas of activity span from coastal biotopes to natural and exotic forests but also include freshwater ecology, paleoecology, and paleontology.

A passion for algal biodiversity Suzanne Fredericq Suzanne Fredericq is a Professor of Biology at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and a long-time collaborator with University of the Azores. She comes from Belgian families of scholars, including female pioneers in law, arts and science. Her scientific career started as a girl with a Weizmann Institute Fellowship for high school graduates, and continued to become one of the most respected algal specialists. She will talk about her passion for algal biodiversity and her field of study - the systematics of marine red algae, a field concerned with detecting patterns of evolutionary relationships among the species under study. She will illustrate how her approach to seaweed research would certainly have been less joyful if it weren't for experiencing analogies in biological structure and process, and in visual art. She will address how the art historian Marie Fredericq-Lilar, her mother, instilled in her a love of art and aesthetics, how the writer Suzanne Lilar, her grandmother, instilled in her a love of intellectual pursuit, and how the painter Eugene J. Martin, her husband, crystallized in her the combination of both.