With a Bachelor’s degree in Animal Ecology and Evolution, Sofía Hernández finished her Master's degree from the University of Montpellier (France) in 2020 with a speciality in Marine Biology, Conservation and Aquaculture.
Over the course of her Master's studies, she was affiliated twice with CIIMAR: first, at the LANUCE laboratory (http://lanuce.ciimar.up.pt/projects) under the supervision of prof. Luisa Valente, working on fish meal optimisation under the context of Circular economy; and then with the ECOBIOTEC laboratory, under the supervision of Dr. Sandra Ramos and Prof. Claire Beatrix Paris from the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences in Miami (https://physical-biological-interactions.earth.miami.edu/index.html), studying larval population connectivity in the Iberian Peninsula.
With an ambivalent profile between Aquaculture and Marine Ecology, her expertise ranges from shark tagging (at the Movement Ecology research team at BIOPOLIS-CIBIO) to marine biodiversity evaluation (Coastal Biodiversity Laboratory – CIIMAR), while covering aquariology (Planet Ocean Montpellier) and coastal bio-remediation (BlueForesting & FutureMARES EU projects).
Currently, she’s a PhD student at the Benthic Ecology Laboratory, under the supervision of Dr. Francisco Arenas (CIIMAR) and Dr. Fernando Lima (BIOPOLIS-CIBIO). Here, her work focuses on assessing the vulnerability and potential adaptive capacity of marine forest habitats (e.g. kelp forests) to extreme thermal events (i.e. Marine Heatwaves).
