Born in Barcelona in 1968, Carles Pelejero graduated in Chemistry at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 1991, with a specialty in Organic Chemistry. He obtained his PhD in Chemistry at the University of Barcelona in 2000, doing research in the fields of paleoceanography and paleoclimatology through the study of molecular biomarkers in deep sea sediments. He then spent four years of postdoctoral research in Australia, at the Australian National University and Geoscience Australia. There, he developed new methodologies for the elemental and isotopic analysis of marine biogenic carbonates using MC-ICPMS and TIMS. In 2005 he moved to the Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM-CSIC), in Barcelona, with a "Ramón y Cajal" contract. In October 2006 he was appointed ICREA Research Professor.

Research interests

I am interested in understanding and quantifying how the marine environment and climate are changing today, in which ways they have changed in the past, and how will they influence marine organisms and ecosystems in the future. To this end, I analyse deep sea sediments and corals as archives of changes in the past, use systems to monitor the present, and run manipulative experiments in aquaria to simulate the future. A main environmental issue that I am currently studying is the progressive acidification of the oceans that is occurring due to the marine absorption of part of the CO₂ that humans are emitting to the atmosphere. I am also setting up culture-based systems to calibrate paleoceanographic proxies in corals, making use of the aquaria facilities at the ICM.