Paula Sánchez, Adolfo Fernández, Sandra Martínez, Susana Magadán, Iria Fernández, Martinho Marta, Isabel Rodríguez and Ana Querejeta. These are doctors who have just joined the University of Vigo and the Spanish Oceanographic Institute of A Coruña to continue, hand in hand with Campus do Mar, their research training and complement the potential of the Immunology, Phylogenomics and Nanotechnology groups of the Biomedical Research Center, Cinbio, the Coastal Ecology and Biological Oceanography groups of the Toralla Marine Science Station, Ecimat and the Archaeology, Antiquity and Territory groups and the Agro-Environmental and Food Research group of the Ourense campus, as well as the IEO of A Coruña.
With the aim of making Campus do Mar an attractive location for doctors with postdoctoral experience and thus reversing the trend of sending doctors trained at the Vigo institution to foreign research centers and universities to complete their training there, the campus of international excellence presented the FellowSea project to the EU’s Marie-Curie Cofund call for the recruitment of postdoctoral research staff with more than four years of experience. Nearly one million euros was the funding achieved a year ago and since then a process has been opened that began with the call for an international competition in which 23 candidates participated (13 from Spain, four from Portugal, two from Italy and one from Denmark, Iceland, Greece and Ireland) and that ended with the resolution of the evaluation committee and the subsequent recruitment of the selected researchers, for a period of three years.
Appreciation and challenges for new doctors
The rector of the University of Vigo, Salustiano Mato, the vice-rector for Research, Asunción Longo and the head of Talent Acquisition at Campus do Mar, Elsa Vázquez, were today in charge of welcoming this group of researchers, who have already been incorporated into their positions, with the exception of Iria Fernández who is still in the US. Mato thanked the researchers for opting for this “demanding and competitive” call and highlighted the “unusual fact that a university, without government support, is able to fight against all odds to attract and retain talent”, referring to the programs that the University of Vigo currently has in place and that make it “unique in Spain”, assured the rector. Mato recalled that attracting talent was one of the objectives of Campus do Mar and expressed his desire that new instruments could be established so that these researchers could continue in the future, something that the actions of political leaders demanded.
The Head of Talent Acquisition at Campus do Mar, Elsa Vázquez, recalled the phases of a process that culminated in the hiring of the doctors, of whom she highlighted their important scientific curricula and encouraged them to give their all “and help Campus do Mar become more internationally recognized.”
Pollution assessment, genomics applied to the study of evolution or fishing heritage
Sandra Martínez and Paula Sánchez, the first from Logroño and the second from Ourense, both studied Marine Sciences at the University of Vigo and from now on they share a location at Ecimat, although in different research groups, that of Coastal Ecology in Paula’s case and that of Global Change: observation, experimentation and modeling in Sandra’s. “Campus do Mar represents a unique opportunity for interdisciplinary collaboration for studies related to the ocean”, says the Rioja native who comes to Vigo from Linnaeus University in Sweden and who works on the study of the response of marine microbial communities to the contributions of nutrients of anthropogenic origin in the context of global change. For her part, Paula Sánchez, presented her candidacy for FellowSea because after two postdoctoral stays in Canada and Portugal, “this project gave me the opportunity to continue my research career without having to make personal sacrifices since my partner has a stable job in Galicia and we did not want to continue maintaining a relationship living 300 kilometers away,” explains the researcher, who came from the University of Aveiro, who works on the assessment of pollution and ecotoxicology in the marine environment and who considers Campus do Mar “a very appropriate bet for Galician universities given the presence of the sea and the activities related to it in our society.”
Still in the US, at the California Academy of Science in San Francisco, Iria Fernández is hurrying to return to Vigo to join the Cinbio Group of Omics Technologies Applied to the Marine Environment. Santiaguesa, with a degree in Biochemistry from the Complutense University of Madrid, Iria considers this a good opportunity to live and work in Galicia and apply the experience acquired during six years as a researcher in the US and Japan, where she dedicated herself mainly to the study of the evolution, ecology and conservation of the biodiversity of coral reefs. “Although Galicia and Spain do not have coral reefs, I feel that in a globalized world it is important to know these rich ecosystems and gain awareness of the importance of taking responsibility and transforming our society to make it more sustainable from an environmental point of view”, emphasizes the researcher, who focuses her line of work on marine genomics applied to the study of the evolution, ecology and conservation of marine biodiversity. Together with Iria Fernández, Susana Magadán, from Vigo, with a degree in Biology from the Autonomous University, will work at Cinbio. She considers her incorporation to Campus do Mar “an opportunity for the development of my career, but also a challenge, since I will work with different species, and that always requires eliminating many preconceived ideas, and I will also carry out a study that only three other groups in the world are doing with salmon, trout and catfish”. The general line of work of Susana Magadán, who arrived from the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique in France, is the application of massive sequencing techniques in the characterization of the adaptive immune response or Immunoma, in marine fish species. Also working at Cinbio, in the Nanotechnology Group, is Ana Querejeta, who arrived from the University of Toronto, to focus on the study of technology for the marine industrial sector.
In the case of Adolfo Fernández, who arrived at the Ourense campus from the University of Coimbra, his work addresses a research axis that has been absent from Campus do Mar until now: the study of ancient heritage on the Galician coast, with special attention to the coast of the Rías Baixas. “This line of work addresses important aspects of our archaeological heritage in the coastal area that are not only limited to the study of productive sites (saltworks, salting factories, etc.) and habitations (fortresses, villages, vicus, etc.), but also studies ancient production models, the export of products or the techniques for producing canned fish in Roman times,” explains the researcher, who will also study and evaluate the risks and threats that these sites are suffering. Isabel Rodríguez will also work on the Ourense campus, who will join the Agro-Environmental and Food Research Group from the University of Reading (United Kingdom) to focus on research into marine resources, specifically integrated management, transformation and valorization.
Martinho Marta Almeida is developing her line of research focused on operational oceanography at the IEO of A Coruña, where she arrived from the University of Aveiro.
Source: duvi
