Laura Sordo is an international marine ecologist specialized in experimental and global change research. She completed her PhD in 2017 with Summa Cum Laude at CCMAR on the effects of ocean acidification (OA) on coralline algae. She built a novel CO2 control system at the UALG experimental station (Sordo et al. 2016). This allowed her to follow the growth and metabolism of algae at different CO2 concentrations in the short term (Sordo et al. 2019) and complete the longest OA experiment (two years) with coralline algae (Sordo et al. 2018). Simultaneously, she studied for the first time the growth and metabolism of maerl populations in Portugal for two years in the field (Sordo et al. 2020). After her Ph.D., she started working at the Portuguese Institute for Sea and Atmosphere (IPMA) in the EU Interreg project Venus, which had the objective to achieve sustainable management of shellfish populations. At IPMA, she built a novel experimental system and completed the longest OA study with clam juveniles of Chamelea gallina (Sordo et al. 2021; Sordo et al., 2024). Simultaneously, in 2019, she did a social study assessing the anthropogenic impact on natural shellfish populations, completing more than 400 face-to-face interviews with recreational harvesters (Sordo et al., 2023). She did an informative poster to increase social awareness of the risks and legislation of this practice, and participated in a study to assess the bycatch and effect of hand-dredge fishery on shellfish populations (Nicolau et al. 2021). During this time, she also published an article on seagrass ecosystems at the limit of distribution in Southern Brazil (Sordo and Lana 2020). From January to June of 2021, she worked as a junior researcher at CCMAR, in the project CLIMFISH to assess the vulnerability of fisheries to climate change. She prepared a workshop with fishermen and other stakeholders to come up with measures to mitigate the effect of climate change on fisheries and did a flyer to disseminate the project. She also participated in the project CRUSTAPANHA developing two experimental systems that worked successfully to produce  crab larvae and assess the effect of temperature on their development (Monteiro et al., 2026). Also in 2021, she won an FCT individual contract (ref. 2020.03396.CEECIND) to develop the project BIVALGAE and find bioremediation solutions to mitigate global change through aquaculture at IPMA. In the context of her current project, she mentored master students and did several experiments to assess the effect of the co-cultivation of algae and oyster larvae under OA (Sordo et al., in preparation) and the effect of alkalinity enhancement on oyster juveniles (Sordo et al., submitted; Farsi et al., in preparation). She found that despite some minor trade-offs, the alkalinization of seawater had a positive effect on the growth and shell biomineralogy of oyster juveniles even under OA conditions. These last years, she specialized in mCDR approaches to mitigate global change, specifically in ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) and blue carbon restoration. In 2025, she participated as an expert on the ICES workshop on the impacts of mCDR on fisheries and aquaculture in London, and in the first Training Course on OAE at the IAEA Marine Environment Laboratories of Monaco. Since 2023, she has been teaching as an Invited Professor at the University of Algarve, subjects such as “Sustainable exploitation of marine living resources”, “Topic of Marine Biology”, “Biology of invertebrates” and “Marine botany”. Dr. Sordo has already published fourteen scientific papers in high-impact international journals, ten of them as the first author, with more than 341 citations, and has won three prizes for the best presentation. During her career, she has advised numerous undergraduate and graduate students, and due to her international formation (USA, Brazil, and Portugal), has been invited as a speaker at the Universities of Florence, Kiel, Malaga, and Algarve.