Patrizia Ziveri is ICREA Research Professor and Scientific Director at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) Unit of Excellence, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). Her scientific career has developed in Italy, USA, the Netherlands and Spain. She earned the PhD in Earth Sciences at the University of Padua, Italy, within an exchange program with the University of South Carolina (USC). Her dissertation dealt with the impacts of El Niño climate oscillations on calcareous phytoplankton in the California Borderlands and the Gulf of California, followed by a postdoc at the USC in the group of R. Thunell. She moved to the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands, first as a researcher joining the groups of J. van Hinte and P. Westbroek, then as professor/senior scientist. Finally she was awarded with a Ramón y Cajal fellowship in Spain at the UAB before joining ICREA in 2014.

Research interests

She is unraveling the impacts of global environmental changes on marine ecosystems and biogeochemistry at various time scales and complexity through multidisciplinary investigation of key marine calcifying groups at the base of the food web. Her work on the oceans in a high CO₂ world is focusing on the links between CO₂ dynamics, climate change and marine organisms in areas such as the Mediterranean Sea and the Southern Ocean, integrating both modern and past global changes. These changes disturb the capacity of marine systems to provide ecosystem services, which affect economic activities and human welfare. Evolving interests have led to new research on microplastics in the Mediterranean island coastlines, and invited memberships, such as the UN-GESAMP, WG 40, Sources, fate and effects of microplastics, advisory board member of the IAEA project OA-ICC, Monaco and a SOLAS/IMBER carbon group member, WG3 ocean acidification.