Cinzia Alessi

Cinzia Alessi obtained her PhD candidate in population biology and ecology at the Pacific doctoral school, University of New Caledonia, New Caledonia. She has a wide range of interests in understanding how corals will be impacted by climate change. Her thesis’s title was: “Corals Living in an Extreme Environment: Implication on Physiological and Reproductive Traits”. With her work, Cinzia wanted to understand how environmental conditions, such as an increase in seawater temperature and decrease in seawater pH and oxygen, could affect corals fitness-related traits, and their reproductive outputs. Her experiments were based in the mangrove lagoon of Bouraké, where corals have been exposed to such atypical conditions for all their life. Cinzia believes that marginal reefs could provide important insights into the effects of ocean warming and ocean acidification on coral gametogenesis, and coral larvae survivorship. Cinzia has developed several restoration techniques based on asexual reproduction, and now she is keen to develop new coral restoration methods based on sexual propagation. In 2015, she received a grant for a period of research at More Marine Laboratory in Florida, USA, where she studied corals for the first time. In 2023 she received a prestigious  price (i.e., L' Oreal-UNESCO) called For Women in Science. Her most prominent first-author publication is entitled: “Ocean acidification and elevated temperature negatively affect recruitment, oxygen consumption and calcification of the reef-building Dendropoma cristatum early life stages: Evidence from a manipulative field study” (Alessi et al., 2019). Other publications are: "Algal symbiont diversity in Acropora muricata from the extreme reef of Bouraké associated with resistance to coral bleaching"  or “Flow-driven micro-scale pH variability affects the physiology of corals and coralline algae under ocean acidification” (Comeau et al., 2019)

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