Susana Coelho
Susana Coelho was born in Portugal and completed her PhD at the Marine Biological Association in the laboratory of Colin Brownlee (Plymouth, UK). She was a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Roscoff (France) from 2006 where her lab focused in life cycle and reproduction of brown algae, and she had a key role in the establishment of the brown algae Ectocarpus as a model organism in evolutionary research. Between 2010 and 2020, she co-led the Algae Genetics Group in Roscoff, and was appointed Research Director at the CNRS in 2015. She is currently Director of the Algal Development and Evolution Department at the Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tubingen, Germany.  

Susana has led a number of large-scale research projects on the evolution and development of brown algae, including two ERC grants (SEXSEA and TETHYS) and she was awarded  prestigious prizes such as the bronze medal of the CNRS (2015), the Trogoboff Prize of the French National Academy of Sciences (2017) and the Bettencourt Prize Coup d d’Elan (2020).