Principal researcher of Marine, microbial, and Estuarine Ecology at the University of Aveiro, Portugal since 2013. I studied biology at the University of Amsterdam. During my study, I spent half a year in the Caribbean where I studied aggressive interactions among coral species. After this, I spent a year in France at the Université de Provence. For my PhD (also in Amsterdam), I spent two and a half years in the jungles of Borneo, mainly studying butterflies but I was also interested in many other organisms in the rainforest and how disturbances such as logging and forest fires affected them. After my PhD in 2002, I was a postdoc at the University of Amsterdam and Naturalis, Leiden. Author of 151 papers, including 53 as first author, in leading international journals in the areas of ecology, microbial ecology, tropical biology, and marine biology. PI or team member of national and international research projects in microbiology and marine ecology. My major interests include corals, sponges, butterflies, odonates, microbial ecology, biostatistics (particularly using R), and relating community structure to spatial, environmental, and temporal processes.