Marta Coll Montón

I am a senior researcher working at the Institute of Marine Science (ICM–CSIC) (Barcelona, Spain). I am a member of the Global Ocean Modelling (GOM) from the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries (University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada), and of the Ecopath International Initiative (EII) non-profit Research Association (Barcelona, Spain). I participate and coordinate research projects and activities, I supervise PhD, MSc, BSc and Erasmus students and I teach specialized courses on marine ecology and ecosystem modelling.

My research focuses on understanding patterns and processes that have and will characterize marine ecosystems and, in particular, changes of, and threats to, marine biodiversity. I study community and food-web dynamics linked with human activities (such as fisheries, eutrophication, invasive species and climate change), and how these translate into changes in ecosystem structure and functioning, and into services that humans obtain from the ocean. I develop and apply a variety of ecological analyses based on ecosystem modelling techniques and statistical tools, and I use historical data, experimental results and field data sets. I currently work on developing and testing scenarios of future trajectories of change to find best solutions for transformative management of the oceans.

I graduated in Environmental Sciences at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain) in 2000, after developing my undergraduate project at the Center for Marine and Limnology Research of the University of Costa Rica (1999-2000) in San José de Costa Rica (Costa Rica). I developed my M.Sc. and Ph.D. at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the Institute of Marine Science (ICM–CSIC) from 2001-2006 (Barcelona, Spain) with research visits abroad in Italy, Canada and South Africa. In 2007-2008 I visited Dr. Lotze’s Lab at the Biology Department of Dalhousie University (Halifax, Canada) as a post-doctoral researcher. From 2009-2011 I was a EC Marie Curie OI Fellow in Dr. Lotze’s Lab and in Dr. Christensen’s Lab at the Fisheries Centre of the British Columbia University (Vancouver, Canada). In 2012-2013 I was a “Ramon y Cajal” contracted researcher at ICM–CSIC (Barcelona, Spain) and in 2013-2016 I worked as a researcher at IRD – UMR MARBEC (Sète, France) and University of Cape Town – MA-RE Institute (South Africa).