Rate My Professor Miguel Mies

Professor Miguel Mies is a faculty member at the Oceanographic Institute of the Universidade de São Paulo (IO-USP). He holds a bachelor’s degree and a PhD in oceanography, both obtained from the IO-USP. Mies currently serves as professor at IO-USP, where he heads the Coral Reefs and Climate Change Laboratory (LARC). He also acts as research coordinator and vice-president of the Coral Vivo Institute. His academic appointments include involvement as deputy coordinator for GT7 (Recifes) in response to the oil spill on the Brazilian coast. Mies has served as a reviewer for more than 30 international scientific journals and was a member of the editorial board for Frontiers in Marine Science, focusing on coral reef research.

Mies’s research centers on coral reef ecology, with emphasis on bleaching and climate change impacts, Symbiodiniaceae molecular biology, coral trophic ecology, symbiotic associations, and reproduction in reef organisms. His work includes field and experimental assessments of coral bleaching on both global and regional scales, contributing to understanding the responses of Brazilian coral reefs to climate change. Key publications include the 2020 paper “South Atlantic Coral Reefs Are Major Global Warming Refugia and Less Susceptible to Bleaching” in Frontiers in Marine Science; the 2018 paper “In situ shifts of predominance between autotrophic and heterotrophic feeding in the reef-building coral Mussismilia hispida” in Coral Reefs; the 2017 paper “Marine Invertebrate Larvae Associated with Symbiodinium: A Mutualism from the Start?” in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution; and the 2019 paper “Evolution, diversity, distribution and the endangered future of the giant clam–Symbiodiniaceae association” in Coral Reefs. Additional works address giant clam aquaculture and larval development of reef organisms. Mies’s contributions have advanced knowledge in marine invertebrate-symbiont interactions and climate resilience of reefs.