THE OTHER RED SEA DR. ZAHRA ALSAFFAR Dr. Zahra Alsaffar is one of the first Saudi female marine scientists in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. She recently graduated from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) with her PhD thesis defense titled: Shallow Soft Sediment Communities in the Central Red Sea: Revealing Patterns in Community Structure across Space and Time. She has obtained a Post-Doctoral fellowship at King Saud University (KSU) in Riyadh. In her new position, she is planning a potential collaboration between KSU and KAUST. Zahra is extremely passionate about science and, more importantly, how we can use this science to improve society. She is seeking to extend her Ph.D. work to find effective and sustainable ways to conserve natural resources and to solve environmental issues. During Zahra’s Ph.D. studies, she had the opportunity to present her work at a number of international conferences where she won awards, including first prize poster presentation “Soft-sediment macrobenthic assemblages in space and time: exploring patterns of variation in a hypersaline sub-tropical coastal lagoon” at the 52nd European Marine Biology Symposium (EMBS) in Piran, Slovenia 2017.
© 2017 Meres Weche
She also won second prize for her poster presentation “Seasonality does not affect the signature of macrobenthic assemblages associated with seagrass meadows in a hypersaline sub-tropical coastal lagoon” at the Aquatic Biodiversity and Ecosystems Conference in Liverpool, UK 2015. Zahra has published an article “The other Red Sea” in The Marine Biologist magazine issued by the Marine Biological Association, Issue 10, May 2018. Read Zahra’s article here.
From left to right: sieving sediment samples for macrofauna analysis; washing sediment samples nearshore. All images are from the Saudi Arabian Red Sea. © Zahra Alsaffar
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