My name is Sofía. I was born and raised in the beautiful sunny beaches of southern Spain, before I moved to Hamburg (Germany), where I did my Bachelor’s and Master’s degree.

Currently, I am a PhD candidate at Nord University (Bodø, Norway), where I study meroplankton and fish larvae dynamics in sub-Arctic fjords and how they influence each other within the food web.

During my Bachelor’s, I was lucky enough to accompany a research team to the Amazon jungle of Ecuador. There, we collected pseudoscorpions (imagine a small scorpion without a tail), and described five new species. These became my first steps in the wonderful field of taxonomy.

Although the jungle was beautiful, I knew my passion was for marine ecosystems and their inhabitants. To steer myself in that direction, I worked with juvenile fish and the question of “what are they eating” in two northern-european estuaries during my Master’s.

In 2023, I finally took my first steps in the field of marine ecology. In February 2023 I started my current position as a PhD Student in the Benthos Ecology Group at Nord University, northern Norway. My research project focuses on pelagic marine benthic invertebrate larvae (meroplankton) and fish larvae of the Northeast Atlantic Ocean. For my research project, I analyse meroplankton interannual dynamics using a zooplankton frequent long-time series, raise cod larvae to study their feeding preferences, and apply metabarcoding analyses to answer the question whether fish larvae in Vestfjord rely on meroplankton as prey organisms.

In my free time you can usually find me outside running, snorkeling, diving, or hiking.