Patrizia Ziveri is ICREA Research Professor and Scientific Director of the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) Unit of Excellence ‘María de Maeztu’, Univ. Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). She started to work on marine global change in the 1990’s during her PhD dissertation at the Univ. of Padua (Italy), and Univ. of South Carolina (USA), focusing on the impacts of El Niño climate oscillations on calcareous phytoplankton in the Eastern Pacific. After a postdoc at USC, she moved to the Vrije Univ. Amsterdam, The Netherlands, first as a researcher then as professor/senior scientist. She was awarded with a Spanish ‘Ramón y Cajal fellowship at the UAB before joining ICREA in 2014. She coordinates the Marine and Environmental Biogeosciences Research Group  (MERS) that catalyzes research on the natural and human-driven marine processes addressing major marine global change and sustainability challenges.

Research interests

Global environmental change on marine ecosystems, ecology, and biogeochemistry at various time scales and complexity is a key theme of her research, focusing on multidisciplinary investigation of marine calcifying groups at the base of the food web. With her work on the ocean in a high CO₂ world, she is linking the CO₂ dynamics, climate change and marine organisms in target regions. Interest on pressing threats to marine systems has led to developing research on ocean acidification (OA) in Africa and in the North Pacific on both OA  and the cycle of microplastics. The study of marine litter and microplastics in Mediterranean island coastlines is an emerging topic in her research group and a new clean laboratory for microplastic studies opened this year at ICTA-UAB. These changes can disturb the capacity of marine systems to provide ecosystem services, thereby affecting economic activities and human welfare.