Pelayo Salinas de León

I’m a happy marine ecologist! Since I was a child, I have loved spending as much time as possible in the water. I spent my childhood summers between the rugged Cantabrian coast of Asturias in northern Spain, where I was born, and the idyllic Mediterranean coast of southern Spain, where my dad’s family is from. I moved to the UK when I was 18 to study marine and freshwater biology at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. I got carried away and four years later I found myself completing an MSc in the environmental management of marine ecosystems. Then the opportunity arose to conduct my PhD at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, where I became a ‘Jedi’ in marine biology in 2010.

As much as I loved collecting samples in temperate intertidal regions, after spending a great proportion of my MSc and PhD research in Indonesia I decided to pursue my career in tropical locations where I could ride my bike to the office wearing sandals and shorts.