​Stamatina (Matina) is originally from Piraeus, Greece’s biggest and most famous port. She studied biology at the University of Patras, where she also obtained an MSc in Environmental Biology and Management of Aquatic and Terrestrial Environments and a PhD in Mesozooplankton Ecology. Her research work so far has been highly interdisciplinary (view her ResearchGate​). She initially developed an expertise in taxonomy of both mesozooplankton and larval fish. This was followed by investigating the influence of mesoscale hydrological complexity on the distribution patterns of zooplankters. Afterwards, she shifted her interest to ecophysiological studies on copepods, through the use of laboratory and mesocosm experiments. It has been exciting for her to work for several years as a postdoc fellow within the Marine Zooplankton Ecology Group at the Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM-CSIC, Barcelona), investigating “bottom-up” effects in the marine planktonic food web.

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In the beginning of August 2015, Matina joined the Red Sea Research Center and since then she has been facing new research challenges. She is currently exploring the diversity of the larval fish community in reef associated and offshore waters in the Red Sea by an integrative approach, combining taxonomy and DNA barcoding. Besides her interest in larval fish diversity and assemblage structure, she is additionally engaged in studying the effects of different environmental stressors (e.g., temperature, UV) on the physiology of zooplankton in the Red Sea.