Cecilia Alonso is a microbial ecologist and Associate Professor at the Centro Universitario Regional del Este (Universidad de la República, Uruguay). Her research focuses on aquatic microbial communities, particularly bacterioplankton, and their role in processes of the carbon cycle, as well as in the development of microbial indicators of environmental quality. She is interested in understanding how environmental transitions in coastal and estuarine systems shape microbial diversity, physiology, and ecosystem functioning. Her work combines single-cell molecular techniques, metagenomics, and statistical modelling applied to long-term field studies and experiments.
Cecilia earned her undergraduate degree in Biological Sciences and her MSc in Biotechnology from the Faculty of Sciences, Universidad de la República (Uruguay), and her Ph.D. from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology (Germany). She carried out postdoctoral research at the University of Zurich (Switzerland) before returning to Uruguay to establish a research group in marine microbial ecology. She is a member of Uruguay’s National System of Researchers (SNI) and of the Graduate Program in Basic Sciences (PEDECIBA).
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