Bianca is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Rubenstein Ecosystem Science Laboratory, working with professors Dr. Jason Stockwell and Dr. Ellen Marsden. Her research focuses on understanding how environmental factors and climate change affect biodiversity and trophic interactions in aquatic systems. At UVM, she is working in the reefs of Lake Champlain, trying to understand the physical-biological coupling processes that drive biodiversity in these areas to better comprehend the effects of climate change in those processes and how species and the entire ecosystem will respond to those changes.
Bianca is an oceanographer, with Master’s in Ecology and Conservation and PhD in Biological Oceanography. She completed her PhD at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande – FURG (Brazil) in 2019, working on the influence of climatic events, especially El Niño, on the estuarine trophic structure, and carbon flow to consumers, and on the variation in the food-chain length. During 2019 and 2020 she worked as a Research Associate in a Long-Term Ecological Research project in the Lagoa dos Patos estuary, and in 2021 was hired as Postdoctoral Research Associate in Biology at Baylor University (USA), where she worked with water quality and its effects through the riverine trophic chain. Bianca's main research interests are understanding how climate events impact species relationships and ecosystem function, mainly focusing on trophic relationships, as well as evaluating the carbon flow through aquatic environments (freshwater-estuary-sea).
