My name is Andrea Montserrat Burfeid Castellanos and I am working on diatoms of intermittent and ephemeral streams (IRES). I am currently employed as a postdoctoral resercher at the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) within the Phycology Lab (Beszteri Lab). I am looking into Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) from Greenland using amplicon sequencing and trying omics.
I started looking into diatoms in 2011. I studied my Bachelor in Biology, Master’s in Biodiversity and PhD in Biodiversity at the University of Barcelona (UB). You can find my PhD thesis titled “Ecological factors and diatom diversity at rivers of the Iberian Mediterranean river basins: macro-scale, meso-scale and micro-scale” here: https://tdx.cat/handle/10803/663475.
After working as a technical assistant at the Hustedt diatom collection at the Alfred-Wegener-Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), I got a scholarship to study epiphytic diatoms in a collaboration of the UB, AWI and the UDE. I then got to be a in-house research assistant, giving me the opportunity of teaching, supervising, investigating and overall “sciencing”.
In 2025 I was elected vice-president of the International Society for Diatom Research (ISDR) after leading the Young ISDR, the early-career fraction of the society, from 2018 to that year. I look forward to further serve and to fasten the position and support of ECRs in the society during my mandate. More information on: https://isdr.org
