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Biodiversity and phylogeography of Northeast Atlantic and Mediterranean
sponges
Bogalho Teixeira Xavier, J.R.
Publication date
2009
Link to publication
Citation for published version (APA):
Bogalho Teixeira Xavier, J. R. (2009). Biodiversity and phylogeography of Northeast Atlantic
and Mediterranean sponges.
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185 I was born on a warm summer day (16th July
1979) blown by the Northerly wind (the typical ‘Nortada’), and grew up at the oceanfront on a small fishermen village on the Northwest coast of Portugal (Caxinas). The beach and rocky pools, just one block away from home, were my childhood’s playgrounds and growing up among the brave (and some times unfortunate) fishermen and their families created in me a curiosity for the sea, its mysteries and creatures. I devoured nature documentaries (especially Jacques Cousteau’s) at a faster pace than cartoons, and the question “what do you want to be when you grow up?” had an increasingly determined “marine biologist” answer from primary school onwards.
In 1997 I set sail for the Azores islands where I found an inspiring place to work and live on. I studied marine biology at the Biology Department (University of the Azores), got my head (and heart) underwater and discovered what I would see myself doing for the rest of my life. In 1999 I started to work on sponge taxonomy in the Invertebrate Zoology lab led by Prof. Ana Costa, who would
186
later on supervise my undergrad thesis on the marine sponges of São Miguel Island. In 2001 I participated in a sponge taxonomy workshop organised by the Department of Oceanography and Fisheries (University of the Azores), tutored by Wallie de Weerdt and in March 2003 I visited her at the Zoological Museum of Amsterdam (ZMA)
for a six-weeks internship. During my visit I met Rob van Soest with whom I discussed many ideas that promptly turned into a PhD project. I was granted a 4-year scholarship by the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation, and moved to The Netherlands by the end of 2004 to endure my first Dutch winter. There I joined the Invertebrate Section of the ZMA (with Rob van Soest as main supervisor) and the Evolutionary Biology group led by Prof. Steph Menken at the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics (IBED), University of Amsterdam. Since November 2008 I have been a guest researcher at IBED/ZMA and a grantee of the Global Census of Marine Life on Seamounts (CenSeam). In January 2010 I will join the Research Centre in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources (CIBIO, Portugal) and the Centre d’Estudis Avançats de Blanes (CEAB, Spain) as a postdoctoral researcher to work on the “Biodiversity, ecology and evolution of the Northeast Atlantic deep-sea sponge fauna”.
