Patrizia Ziveri is an ICREA Research Professor at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) at the Universitat 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)/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, NL, first as a researcher then as senior scientist/associate professor. She joined ICREA in 2014. She coordinates the Marine and Environmental Biogeosciences Research Group that catalyzes research on the natural and human-driven marine processes addressing major marine global change and sustainability challenges. She was the Scientific Director of the ICTA-UAB Center of Excellence ‘María de Maeztu’ from 2016 to 2020.

Research interests

Global environmental change on marine ecosystems, ecology, and biogeochemistry at various time scales and complexity is a key theme of her research group, focusing on multidisciplinary investigation of marine organisms at the base of the food web and processes. With her work on the ocean in a changing climate and under human pressure, she is linking CO₂ dynamics, climate change and target marine processes and systems. Interest on pressing threats to the marine environment and their societal relevance has led to developing research on ocean acidification, warming and oxygen loss in different regions. The study of marine litter and the dispersion of microplastics in coastal and ocean systems is another research area of her group and a new clean laboratory targeting microplastic studies opened recently at ICTA-UAB. Her research is bridging the natural and social systems on issues of major societal and sustainable development concern.