Dr. Carolina Bastidas is a research scientist at MIT Sea Grant’s Marine Advisory Services group. She has over twenty years of professional experience in basic and applied research on the ecology of marine hard-bottom communities and human impacts on them. After earning her PhD from James Cook University in Australia, Bastidas was appointed to a faculty position at Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas, Venezuela. There, she spent ten years leading and managing research projects on coral reefs and the biology of their marine invertebrates and forming a new generation of Venezuelan marine scientists, many of whom continued remarkable careers overseas. She also established valuable collaborations with local and international colleague and communicated her research results in peer-reviewed journals and through outreach activities.

Bastidas’ research interests include changes in marine communities, the connectivity of populations, the biology of benthic marine invertebrates linked to global climate change, and eutrophication and pollution. Her work has contributed towards understanding coral-microbial associations, changes in Caribbean coral reefs and potentially bioinvasive species in coastal marine environments. More recently, her collaborative research includes drivers of coastal ocean acidification and its effects on marine organisms.