The path to Antarctica, the story of a MARE researcher
Researcher Catarina Frazão Santos (MARE|ARNET) recently gave an interview on the podcast "Ciência Polar à Portuguesa", produced by the Association of Polar Early Career Scientists Portugal, where she revealed the moment when polar regions entered her scientific career and what drew her to studying them.
It was after her PhD, while working at the Guia Marine Laboratory with a focus on climate change and marine spatial planning, that Catarina realised polar regions had fewer spatial plans in place and were less studied on this topic, particularly Antarctica. From the OCEANPLAN - Marine Spatial Planning under a Changing Climate, project came MSPOLAR: Marine Spatial Planning in Polar Regions, a project that in turn inspired PLAnT - Planning for Sustainable Use of the Ocean in Antarctica, funded by the European Research Council (ERC), launched in 2024. In this project, the researcher has been exploring the benefits and challenges of developing smart marine spatial planning (MSP) from a climate perspective in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean.
Catarina Frazão Santos's international path began with a short term placement, arranged through a partnership between FLAD and MARE, which took her to the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). She worked alongside the team developing sensitivity maps for NOAA, later following their implementation, and also had the opportunity to visit the US Coast Guard in New York to observe how the agency responded to oil spill situations. The researcher considers that "it was a moment that marked the beginning of an international network," referring to the professional relationships she built there. She also believes these experiences are valuable, not only for the challenge of stepping outside one's comfort zone, but also for the impact they can have on the choice of research topics. "It completely changed what I went on to do in my master's," the researcher says.
Despite the pressure that often exists to start a PhD immediately after a master's degree, Catarina worked as a research fellow in the group led by professor and MARE|ARNET researcher Francisco Andrade, responsible for environmental monitoring work in Troia and environmental impact studies. This was a highly dynamic phase, with an interdisciplinary team spanning fields from coastal geodynamics to macrofauna, and it gave her a great deal of hands on experience. During this period, as interest in marine spatial planning grew, Catarina identified a potential parallel between the topic and the environmental sensitivity assessments she had studied during her master's.
A further international experience, the "Conservation Biology and Policy" summer course at Duke University (USA), helped shape her PhD, with the idea of exploring marine spatial planning in connection with ocean policy. In this new phase, she was supervised by researcher Francisco Andrade, a biologist, and researcher Michael K. Orbach, an anthropologist, benefiting, in her words, "from the integration of very different perspectives."
The researcher attended meetings of the Antarctic Treaty, as part of the Portuguese delegation, an experience she considers to have been essential in understanding the difference between doing science and the impact it can have in a geopolitical context, adding to the insights she had already gained from her experience in different settings in Portugal, Cabo Verde and Mozambique.
Catarina Frazão Santos and her team will set off on their first mission next year. Although "90% of the work does not require travelling to Antarctica," the researcher believes "there are things you can only understand by experiencing them firsthand." Still, she notes that even if she could not visit these areas, she would continue studying them.
For Catarina, striking a balance between personal and professional life is important: "We are more complete people when we have a personal life too, and that also translates into different science." She believes there is greater awareness today of mental health and wellbeing, noting that in her free time she enjoys reading crime novels and going hiking because it "frees the mind," and that she is happy to have taken up horse riding again, a passion that began in her teenage years.
When asked what advice she would give to young scientists wishing to work in the polar context, the researcher believes the most important thing is to pursue what excites you and brings out your inner spark, even when the odds of success seem low; it is important "not to give up, and not to take failures and setbacks personally."
Text: Patrícia Chaves