Dr. Ramon Masssana is the Coordinator of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie ITN SINGEK and co-director of the MARBITS platform. He obtained his Ph.D. in Biology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 1993, focusing on trophic microbial interactions in a stratified lake. Afterward, he spent two years as a postdoc at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he learned how to use molecular techniques in microbial ecology and participated in the discovery of marine archaea.
Since 1997 he is a researcher at the Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM-CSIC). His main research interests are the study of microbial diversity, specifically of protists, in the marine environment, both in terms of a description of the taxonomic composition of these assemblages as well as understanding their patterns of temporal and spatial variation in the environment. At present, one of his research lines is devoted to open the black box of heterotrophic flagellates, small protists that play fundamental roles in marine food webs as bacterial grazers and nutrient remineralize. It is remarkable how little is known about the phylogenetic and functional diversity of the dominant members of this assemblage in marine waters. In fact, recent results indicate that yet uncultured protists play a very important and unanticipated role.
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