Patrizia Ziveri is ICREA Research Professor at the Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, (ICTA-UAB) where she coordinates the Marine Environmental Systems Science (MERS) that catalyzes research on the natural and human-driven marine processes and related social challenges. Before joining ICREA, she obtained her PhD at the University of Padua (Italy) / University of South Carolina (USA), focusing on the impacts of El Niño climate oscillations on calcareous phytoplankton in the Eastern Pacific Ocean. After a postdoc at USC, she moved to the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, as a research scientist / associate professor. She led the first European coordinated effort to address ocean acidification in the Mediterranean Sea. She is presently the ICTA-UAB Scientific Director and was the coordinator of the first ‘María de Maeztu’ Excellence grant of ICTA-UAB (2015-20).

Her scientific interest is on marine global change, ecology, and biogeochemistry at various complexity and temporal scales, from cellular processes to geological records. With her research group, she studies the ocean under climate change and human pressure. A main research focus is on calcium carbonate production and cycling in the marine environment, a major biogeochemical process that plays an important role in modulating atmospheric CO₂ levels and thus has direct implications for climate regulation and society. Her research encompasses marine food-web organisms, biodiversity, paleoecology, and microplastics, addressing societal and environmental challenges such as ocean acidification, warming, and oxygen loss in both coastal and open-ocean systems. She works in diverse regions from the poles to the tropics and at the global scale and supports socially relevant marine studies in coastal Africa and the Mediterranean Sea.