Eva is originally from Spain. Having spent a large part of her childhood by the seaside in Alicante, she became curious about nature and the environment. A curiosity, which years later in 2009, led her to pursue a degree in biology at the University of La Laguna (ULL), Tenerife. After obtaining her B.S. in biology, she also completed her MSc in biotechnology at ULL. Then, she graduated from a master degree in biodiversity and ecosystem management at the University of the Basque Country, before completing her Ph.D. in molecular ecology at AZTI, Spain, in 2017. During her PhD thesis, she focused on the development of biotic indices based on environmental DNA data to derive marine ecological quality assessment. She characterized both benthic macroinvertebrate and bacterial communities from sediments using DNA metabarcoding techniques and validated the approach for marine monitoring and assessment.
Her main research area focusses on the understanding of benthic community changes as a response to natural and human-induced environmental alterations. Comprehensively evaluating how anthropogenic stressors affect community composition will help us to provide knowledge to policymakers and environmental managers regarding the sustainable use of marine resources.
Currently, as a postdoc in the Red Sea Research Center at KAUST, her research is focused on the analysis of the changes in eukaryotic and prokaryotic diversity due to anthropogenic pressures such as aquaculture, port constructions or oil extraction. For this purpose, she is analyzing biological communities from different impacted areas using molecular tools with the final objective of developing new biotic indices to be implemented in standard routine monitoring programs.
