People detail

The general focus of my research is the study of the contemporary sedimentary dynamics in the marine environment. Most of my research has been motivated to understand the mechanisms responsible for the off-shelf and cross- and along-margin sediment transport, with a special interest in the role that submarine canyons play as preferential conduits for the export of particles and associated constituents from shallow to deep regions. These studies have had a significant inter-disciplinary component, with the aim of assessing the consequences of specific sedimentary processes in the marine ecosystem, covering a large spectrum of aspects such as the transport and fate of pollutants, the effect of high energetic hydrodynamic mechanisms in the resuspension of bottom sediments and the interactions between fluxes of material and energy and deep-sea biological and geological processes. The participation in research projects conducted in different continental margins provided me a wide knowledge of the variety of oceanographic and sedimentological processes that operate in them. The fact that these studies covered different environments, from estuaries and continental shelves to deep-sea regions, and that involved scientists from different oceanographic disciplines, also allowed me to have a wide and more global view of the continental margins functioning, and to conceive them as a whole. Lately, the focus of my research has been addressed to understand the role of deep-sea bottom trawling activities in the sediment resuspension and dispersal in continental slope environments.