Rocío Aimé Nieto Vilela

I am a marine biologist specialised in understanding how physical stress affects rocky intertidal organisms. I am interested in the consequences of thermal stress, both under natural and experimental conditions. During my PhD I wanted to study the potency of two stress sentinels -heat shock proteins and shell shape variation- under their natural conditions along Patagonia, and under futures scenarios predicted by the IPCC. After finishing my PhD, exploring new approaches to assess stress, with the same sentinels, I started a postdoc to study the effect of organochlorine contaminants as disruptive agents within organisms that bioaccumulate them. At the same time, to learn about non-invasive techniques to asses stress I made an internship in Porto (Portugal) assessing the effect of thermal stress on invertebrates’ heartbeats and performing experiments to evaluate their thermal tolerance. Recently I started to work as a research assistant at CIBIO-InBIO which will allow me to deepen my learning in the use of new non-invasive stress measurement techniques and manage new biodiversity data.