Dr. Olivier De Clerck
Dr. De Clerck is a phycologist, working at Ghent University in Belgium . His research focuses on genetics, diversity and distributions of marine macroalgae. He addresses questions ranging from purely descriptive taxonomic studies, ecological studies forecasting the distribution of species in relation to environmental changes to applied projects related to aquaculture. A substantial part of his research involves culturing, crossing and manipulating seaweed strains to study growth, development and reproduction of seaweeds. His fundamental research bridges his academic interests with applied phycology aimed at cultivating seaweeds. He successfully led the Ulva genome project in collaboration with several European research institutes and his team is further developing genetic tools enabling functional characterisation of genes (transformation and CRISPR gene editing). In the past he was a work group leader in Phycomorph, a COST Action aimed at unifying a scattered European research landscape to enable a step-change in the basic knowledge of macroalgal reproduction and development. He is on the editorial board of several phycological journals, and is associate editor of Journal of Phycology. olivier.declerck@ugent.be
