Ana Fernández-Carrera is a marine ecologist and biogeochemist with a focus on plankton-mediated processes. She has a degree in Marine Sciences, and earned a Ph.D. in Oceanography from the University of Vigo (Spain). Her dissertation was focused on the distribution and control factors of Trichodesmium and the microbial community nitrogen fixation rates in the tropical and subtropical Atlantic Ocean. During her first PhD at the Georgia Institute of Technology (USA), , she applied an isotope ecology approach to trace the input of gas and oil released into planktonic food webs after the 2010 Deep Water Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. In the next position at the Universidade de Vigo, she started one of her ongoing research lines, the definition of drivers of autotrophic plankton activity and diversity in the central Atlantic at a high spatial resolution. Previous to join the Group of Biological Ocenography, Dr. Fernández Carrera worked three years at the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemuende (Germany), where she started another ongoing line, trying to decipher how the changing environmental forcing along the Amazon River plume impact the structure of planktonic food webs.