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.