Plenary speakers
Tuesday 3 May
Tom Moens
Tom Moens is a full professor in marine ecology at the Biology Department of Ghent University, Belgium. His main research interests involve the study of marine benthic food webs, with emphasis on the positions, interactions and roles of benthic fauna and how these are affected by environmental disturbances; biodiversity – ecosystem functioning relationships; and interactions between marine invertebrates and microbes. He has ample biodiversity expertise on – mostly – nematodes using both microscopic and molecular approaches. He has a keen interest in the evolutionary and ecological (species-environment and species-species interactions) processes that generate and shape benthic metazoan biodiversity, mainly at local scales. In turn, one of his main research foci is on how local metazoan diversity affects ecosystem functioning. He mainly uses experimental approaches in both lab and field to address these issues.
T.M. has been involved in a variety of nationally and internationally funded projects. He has (co)authored 155 peer-reviewed articles and several book chapters. He has acted as a reviewer for >40 international journals, and is an associate editor of the Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the U.K.