Who are we?

Begoña Vendrell Simón, biologist and anthropologist, is a professor of experimental sciences at the Sant Gregori School in Barcelona. Prior to teaching, she did a pre-doctoral research at the Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM-CSIC) on benthic ecology in Antarctica.

Her passion for education, however, led her to become involved in numerous outreach and education projects, and ultimately redirected her doctoral dissertation to this field. In addition, she studied Social and Cultural Anthropology, and she is particularly interested in traditional ecological knowledge.

She has been the coordinator of The Sea in Depth thorough project since its inception, for which she has devised and produced a lot of teaching material and she is a regular collaborator. She participates in organising and conducting workshops for teacher training and she loves to learn from colleagues and students.

Graduated in Biology by the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). In her last year of her degree she participated in the Support of Practical Teaching Program of the Zoology department of the UAB. She developed her practicum at the Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM-CSIC) about reproductive aspects of Mediterranean gorgons under the LIFE+INDEMARES project. From then, she participates actively as well in research projects as in outreach projects in the group Benthic Suspension Feeders of ICM-CSIC.

Master in Oceanography and Marine Environmental Management by the University of Barcelona (UB) and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), she based her Master Degree Final Work in the search of distribution patterns of Antarctic gorgons in the Weddell Sea. She is part of the team “The Sea in Depth”, a project that involves diferent outreach events and where she develops and creates different didactical resources. She is also an active member of APECS-Spain, the Association of Polar Early-Career Scientists that organizes each year different activities in primary and high schools and in museums about Antarctica. She also belongs to the Comision of ICM-CSIC in the alliance with Tanit School under the Magnet project, a project to mitigate the effects of scholar segregation.

Stefano Ambroso is a PhD student at the Department of Marine Biology of the Institut de Ciències del Mar in Barcelona. His current research focuses on the study of the structure and dynamics of benthic communities dominated by long-lived species, dwelling on the continental shelf of the Weddell Sea by means of Remote Operated Vehicle (ROVs). He has been involved in many marine research projects (BENTOLARV, LIFE-INDEMARES, MEDRECOVER, ENPI, ECOSAFIMED) related with the conservation and management of Mediterranean coastal areas. His research activity is also related to the ecology and the spatial distribution patterns of Mediterranean benthic communities and their relationship with the environmental parameters. He is also interested to achieve a comprehensive understanding of several ecological and biological aspects of the Mediterranean gorgonian such as their distribution, growth and reproduction.

Scientific and naturalist illustrator. He works since 1979 as an independent scientific illustrator, he has collaborated in works like Natural History of the Catalan Countries, Biosphere and several volumes of Fauna Iberica, and he is an usual illustrator of the Spanish edition of National Geographic. In addition, hundreds of his drawings illustrate from scientific works to outreach works. His interest in the work of his predecessors has led him to study the history of this profession, which straddles art and science.

As a naturalist he has dedicated his efforts to studying the ecology and taxonomy of a little-known group of marine crustaceans, of which he has described numerous species. He is currently collaborating with other ICHN members on a study of bryophyte communities and he is also involved in the Catalan Butterfly Monitoring Scheme, where he is responsible for two of the monitoring stations.