Michael Y. Roleda is a Professor at the Marine Science Institute of the University of the Philippines-Diliman. His passion for tropical seaweeds started in the early 1990s cataloguing their biodiversity and worked on the biology and biochemistry of an agarophyte, Gelidiella acerosa. Further graduate study and postdoctoral fellowships in Germany, Sweden, and Scotland enabled him to work on cold-temperate and polar seaweeds and microalgae with emphasis on their physiological responses to global climate change stressors (e.g., UVR, ablation-derived sedimentation, ocean warming and acidification, and eutrophication). In 2004, he went bipolar– participated in land-based expeditions to Spitsbergen in the Arctic and King George Island in the Antarctic. His search for a niche brought him to the Southern Ocean in New Zealand (2010) and then back to the North Atlantic in Norway (2014), where he started working on the food and feed applications of seaweeds. He came full circle in 2018– back in the Philippines working on the biodiversity of carrageenan-producing eucheumatoids (Kappaphycus spp., Eucheuma denticulatum, and Betaphycus gelatinus, among others), led and improved the in vitro and hatchery gene banks with >200 unique strains undergoing genotypic and phenotypic characterizations, understanding their ecological breath and susceptibility to pest and diseases, and innovating mitigating measures.

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Research spotlight:

Roleda, M.Y., Hinaloc, L.A.R., Capacio, I.T., Jao, M.C.B., Crisostomo, B.A. (2024). Reproductive Biology and Novel Cultivar Development of the Eucheumatoid Kappaphycus alvarezii. In: Critchley, A.T., Hurtado, A.Q., Neish, I.C. (eds) Tropical Phyconomy Coalition Development. Developments in Applied Phycology, vol 11. Springer, Cham.

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