Department: General Assembly

Rui Figueira is a Member of the LifeWatch ERIC General Assembly.

He is Assistant Professor of the Instituto Superior de Agronomia of the University of Lisbon and GBIF Node Manager for Portugal. He has participated in national and international projects in biodiversity informatics, agrobiodiversity, RIs, ecology, biogeography and biodiversity and conservation. He represents Portugal in the ESFRI Environment Strategic Working Group, and is an additional national delegate to the GBIF Governing Board. He has experience in national and international training and capacity building in collections management systems, data standards, quality & publication, as well as open data, ecology, ecotoxicology and geostatistics. He has supervised doctoral and master’s theses. His skills include scripting and programming languages, SQL, R, Pandas, cloud management, DwC and EML data standards.

Marjolein Robijn is Member of the LifeWatch ERIC General Assembly and FINCOM.

She studied medical biology at VU University Amsterdam and did her PhD at the Parasitology Department of Leiden University, where she used mass spectrometry to study glycans and glycoproteins of the parasite Schistosoma mansoni. Marjolein Robijn is head of Life Sciences within the NWO Domain Science. She works at the interface between policy and research and aims to contribute to optimising the scientific landscape. She is interested in large infrastructures as research and innovation systems and functional networks.

Alejandro Rodríguez is an Alternate Member of the LifeWatch ERIC General Assembly.

He is Water Commissioner at the Guadalquivir River Basin Authority (CHG).

Pedro Beja is a Member of the LifeWatch ERIC General Assembly and IKCC.

He is a Conservation Biologist interested in the natural and anthropogenic drivers of biodiversity change in human-dominated landscapes. He is Associate Director of Operations, Fund Raising and Knowledge Transfer at BIOPOLIS, and Deputy Director of CIBIO – Research Centre in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources, of the University of Porto, and InBIO – Research Network in Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology (Associate Laboratory). He is also holder of the EDP Chair in Biodiversity and Principal Investigator of the research group ApplEcol – Applied Population and Community Ecology. He has authored over 170 publications in international journals and edited books, and has supervised over 20 PhD students.

Michele Crisafi is a Member of the LifeWatch ERIC General Assembly.

Mauro Bertelletti is a Member of the LifeWatch ERIC General Assembly.

Georgios Kotoulas is Chair of the LifeWatch ERIC General Assembly.

Georgios Kotoulas is a Member of the LifeWatch ERIC General Assembly. He is at the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research; Institute of Marine Biology and Genetics; Genetics and Molecular Biotechnology Group. He mainly focuses on Marine Biodiversity with a background in Population Genetics, Evolution and an interest in Ecosystems Biology and Genomics.

Joana Pinheiro is Delegate and alternate to the HoD of LifeWatch ERIC’s General Assembly.

Vladislav Popov is Vice Chair of the LifeWatch ERIC General Assembly.

He is Vice-rector and Professor at the Department of Agroecology at the Agricultural University of Plovdiv. He is the Bulgarian representative in Commission Expert group to act as “shadow” Strategic Configuration of the Horizon Europe Programme Committee (E03662). He is one of the founders of sustainable and organic farming in Bulgaria with a 25+ years experience in R&D projects, as well as being a consultant in organic farming, agroecology and environmental protection in 26+ countries worldwide. He has authored over 120 scientific and technical publications on organic farming, agri-environment and sustainable management of natural resources.