Karine Aparecida Felix Ribeiro

She holds a Bachelor's degree in Biological Sciences from the Universidade do Extremo Sul Catarinense (UNESC), during which she completed a 10-month academic exchange at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona, supported by a SWG-CNPq scholarship. During this international experience, she conducted her undergraduate thesis at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE-CSIC), focusing on evolutionary genetics. She completed both her Masters and Ph.D. in Ecology at the Institute of Biosciences of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), where she carried out research in microbial ecology. Her masters work focused on microalgae and cyanobacteria, while her doctoral research expanded to bacterial communities across a set of coastal lagoons in southern Brazil. She has completed two postdoctoral fellowships: the first at UFRGS, in the Department of Genetics and Molecular Biology, where she studied the viromes of Culex mosquitoes, exploring hostmicroorganism interactions and ecological predictors; the second at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), where she investigated the ecology of microbial communities associated with cold seeps in the deep South Atlantic Ocean. Her research focuses primarily on the diversity, structure, and functioning of microbial communities, with particular interest in the ecological and evolutionary processes that shape microbial community assembly across diverse natural environments. (Source: Lattes Curriculum)