Ana-Belen Yanez Suarez is a National Geographic explorer for a research grant she was awarded to investigate the cold-water corals’ biodiversity and distribution across oxygen minimum zones on the Galapagos and Isla del Coco on board Falkor (too) 2023. Ana-Belen contributed to systematically characterizing the Galapagos seamount deep-sea ecosystems at the Charles Darwin Research Station in 2016- 2017. She also worked in coral reef restoration in the Caribbean. Later she was awarded a competitive Erasmus Mundus scholarship to study for an MSc degree at UGent and Sorbonne University, where she studied the effects of ocean warming and eutrophication on corals. Ana-Belen is currently pursuing a doctoral degree at the Marine Institute of Memorial University of Newfoundland at 4d Oceans Lab, where she is studying deep-sea ecology of megabenthic communities focusing on cold-water corals applying structure from motion photogrammetric techniques to develop 3D models of deep-sea structures.
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