António Pinheiro (Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Portugal) | Co-chair

António Pinheiro started his 35 years engineering and research career on hydraulic structures, dam hydraulics, and hydropower stations, but on the past 20 years has dedicated a significant part of his research activities to different ecohydraulics topics. His research interests include habitat restoration, fish passage, and, more recently, hydropeaking analysis, and structural and operational mitigation measures downstream of hydropower plants. The experience that he has got on hydraulics structures design and research has been quite useful to establish the guidelines of the research activities and to develop the experimental facilities that his team has been working in the past 15 years. Together with his co-chair, Teresa Ferreira, he promoted on 2010 the Ph.D. course on River Restoration and Management at the University of Lisbon, which has had the participation of universities and institutions from different European countries, Canada and Brazil. His involvement in the European project H2020, FIThydro, Fish Friendly Technologies for Hydropower, has greatly increased his interest in the research topics related with up and downstream fish passage, and on fish behavior assessment. He has been very active in university management, presently chairing the IST Ethics Committee and being member of the University Senate’s Scientific Affairs Committee. António Pinheiro has an extensive experience in national and international meetings organization, mainly derived from the years that he dedicated to the management of the Portuguese Association for Water Resources (APRH). 

Teresa Ferreira (School of Agriculture, University of Lisbon, Portugal) | Co-chair

M. Teresa Ferreira is a Full Professor at the Department of Natural Resources, Environment and Landscape, University of Lisbon. She is a Biologist (1981) and has a post-graduation on Limnology (1984), and a PhD on Forest Sciences and Natural Resources Management (1992). She is responsible for a MSc program on Natural Resources Management and Conservation and a PhD program on River Restoration and Management. She has supervised over 40 MSc thesis, and 19 PhD thesis, being presently responsible for a research group on Forest Biodiversity. For a decade, she belonged to the School Council, presently she belongs to the Science Council of the School. M.T. Ferreira research is on freshwater ecology and management, with special interest on biological monitoring, fish community ecology, fish habitat requirements and riparian ecology. She has been involved in many applied ecological aspects of river management including fish pass design, fish responses to stressors, management of riparian and invasive vegetation and riparian restoration. She was involved in several European projects such as STAR, FAME, RIPIDURABLE, EFI+, RICOVER and more recently MARS. She was involved or responsible for 57 national research projects or advanced consultancy studies. She published more than 160 ISI papers, and has more than 400 oral communications and papers in proceedings. She has been a book editor four times. She has been involved in WFD implementation in Portugal since early times, having developed sampling protocols and indices. She was responsible for the Intercalibration Exercise for the Mediterranean. She was involved in most RBMP, both as consultant or as advisor for the water administration. She is a member of the National Water Council and of several regional basin councils.   

Laura Wildman (New England Regional Office/ Princeton Hydro, USA) | SC Representative

Ms. Wildman is a practicing fisheries engineer that established and runs the New England Regional Office for Princeton Hydro focusing on ecological restoration consulting for aquatic systems.  Her expertise and passion, centers on the restoration of rivers through the reestablishment of natural functions and aquatic connectivity. She is considered one of the foremost nation U.S. experts on barrier removal and alternative fish passage techniques, regularly lecturing, instructing, and publishing on these topics; including assisting with the instruction of courses for the University of Wisconsin and Yale University.  She recently co-wrote the Dam Removal chapter in the book Sea to Source 2.0, in addition to a publication for a special edition of the Journal of Engineering Geology regarding the history and human dimensions of barrier removal projects.  In addition to engineering, her work has emphasized reconnecting communities to rivers, and the socio-economic complexities relating to the balance between natural resource management and healthy river systems. She has been involved in hundreds of river restoration, barrier removal, and fish passage projects throughout the U.S.; working on all aspects of the projects from inception through design and construction, both as a licensed professional engineer designing and managing the projects and as a non-profit project partner when she was the Chief Engineer of American Rivers.  

Ana Quaresma (Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Portugal) | Member

Ana is a civil engineer that since young had a passion for water. Started her professional career in a hydropower company working mainly on Dam design and rehabilitation and on the River Basin Plans. Given her interests on fluvial hydraulics and the environment she undertook a MSc in environmental engineering focusing on Hydraulics and Water Resources with the topic Energy dissipation downstream of dams established in alluvial beds. She then worked in consulting companies in hydraulics and ecohydraulics studies, among which the River Basin Management Plans, before engaging in the River Restoration and Management PhD. Her research focused on Developing pool-type fishways based on physical and numerical modelling. Her main research interests are ecohydraulics, fishways, experimental instrumentation, numerical modelling, fluvial hydraulics, and river restoration.

Carlos Garcia de Leaniz (Centre for Sustainable Aquatic Research, Swansea University, UK) | Member

Carlos Garcia de Leaniz is Professor of Aquatic BioSciences and Director of the Centre for Sustainable Aquatic Research (CSAR). He obtained his BSc in Marine Biology at the University of Victoria (BC, Canada) and his PhD (Zoology) at the University Aberdeen (UK), followed by post-doctoral research at the University of Glasgow and ZSL London. He has +35 years experience in the fields of Fish Behaviour, Conservation and Ecology, and Aquaculture-Environment Interactions.  He teaches on conservation of aquatic resources, fish welfare, and fisheries and aquaculture at Swansea University. He is also visiting Professor of Aquaculture at the University of Crete (Greece). He has acted as grant reviewer in the UK, Norway, Chile, France, Romania, Spain, the EU, Switzerland, and the US, and serves as Academic Editor for PLoS ONE.  Much of his research is highly applied, has consistently attracted media interest, and is serving to inform policy. In addition to his scientific outputs (Goggle Scholar citations = 3,022 h-index = 30), he has published +30 articles disseminating popular science and is regularly involved in giving presentations to the public, angling clubs, fish farmers, and policy makers. He was awarded the 2014 ‘Living Streams’ prize for his contribution to the conservation of Atlantic salmon. His work has appeared in Nature, The Guardian, The Times, NERC Planet Earth, BBC News Wales, Wikipedia, Practical Fish Keeping, National Geographic, Horizon Magazine, and was also the In Focus Editorial choice for Animal Behaviour.

Isabel Boavida (Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Portugal) | Member

Isabel Boavida is a researcher at CERIS (Civil Engineering Research and Innovation for Sustainability) in IST, University of Lisbon. With a background in environment engineer and hydraulics she is passionate in understanding the fish behavior in rivers due to alterations in flow. Her research topics include hydrodynamic and habitat modelling, ecohydrology, ecological flows, river restoration, and sustainable hydropower. Isabel has been involved in research, teaching, and consultancy work in environment engineers and river management. During the last decade her research focus has been on hydropower impacts regarding fish. She is thrilled to understand the effects of hydropeaking in freshwater fish and propose actions to mitigate those impacts. In this context, she has done an internship at SINTEF Norway, coordinated EcoPeak project and participated in FIThydro project. Isabel is a member of the Committee of the Ecosystems and Water Quality from the Portuguese Association of Water Resources and a member of the Animal Welfare Body of Instituto Superior Técnico.  She is passionate for outdoors, if she is not in the field doing research you may spot her enjoying nature while hiking, biking or climbing a rock.

José Maria Santos (School of Agriculture, University of Lisbon, Portugal) | Member

José Maria Santos is a Principal Researcher at the School of Agriculture, University of Lisbon and member of the executive board of the Forest Research Centre. His actual research interests focus primarily on ecohydraulics, fish migration and passage, river restoration and on freshwater fish ecology. His scientific activity has been focused on the development and improvement of technical (pool-type) and special (fish lifts) fishways for effective passage of cyprinid species and eels, as well as on microhabitat use and preference of endemic species and implications on restoration. He coordinated and participated in several scientific and knowledge transfer projects aiming the development of mitigation measures for small and large instream obstacles to fish migration. He is member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Ecohydraulics and Water and president of the Committee of the Ecosystems and Water Quality from the Portuguese Association of Water Resources.

Paulo Branco (School of Agriculture, University of Lisbon, Portugal) | Member

Paulo is a Biologist with a doctorate in Engineering. He has been interested in the freshwater network fragmentation problematic for the last 11 years. Paulo has tackled this scientific and applied problem by conducting both theoretical and experimental research trying to quantify network connectivity and produce management guidelines to enhance connectivity for freshwater fish species taking a structural and functional holistic approach to fishway research and barrier removal. In his research Paulo uses approaches than span hydraulic engineering, empirical modeling, software development, new technologies testing, theoretical conceptualization and hypothesis formulation dealing with the dendritic hierarchical nature of freshwater systems to advance scientific knowledge.

Pedro R. Almeida (University of Évora, Portugal) | Member

Pedro R. Almeida is an Assistant Professor with Aggregation in the Department of Biology at the University of Évora, and is a Vice-Director of MARE – Marine and Environmental Sciences Centre. In the past 30 years his scientific activity has been dedicated to the study of the biology and ecology of fish (diadromous, freshwater, estuarine and coastal species). He has a considerable experience on the use of aquatic biotelemetry (radio, acoustic and physiological) for monitoring fish behavior. He has coordinated more than 20 scientific and applied projects concerning management and conservation of fish, particularly diadromous species. During the last decade he coordinated several projects involving the construction and monitoring of fish passes and the management of anadromous fish commercial fisheries, with special emphasis in the River Mondego case study. Presently, he is the coordinator of the project LIFE ÁGUEDA in which one of the main objectives is the reestablishment of the longitudinal connectivity in Águeda and Alfusqueiro rivers (Vouga river basin, Portugal).

Teresa Viseu (National Laboratory of Civil Engineering, Lisbon, Portugal) | Member

Maria Teresa Viseu  is a Research Officer of the National Laboratory of Civil Engineering (LNEC) and the Head of Water Resources and Hydraulic Structures Division of the  Water and Environmental Department; She has a PhD on Civil Engineering and works in the expertise  areas of hydraulic structures, fluvial hydraulics, hydrology and water resources;  She  carries research on the development and application of numerical models of floods and dam-break floods, on laboratory experiments of embankments failures as well as on numerical CFD & physical models of flow in hydraulic structures; She participated in projects for the UNDP United Nation Development Program, World Bank, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 5th, 6th, 7th & Horizon 2020 European Commission Programs, US National Science Program (NSF) as well as for Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).

Maria João Costa (Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Portugal) | Member

Maria João has integrated diverse research projects addressing the effects of anthropic pressures for freshwater communities, particularly macroinvertebrates, fish and amphibians. Her research has focused on understanding the dynamics of these communities to point and nonpoint sources of pollution and to landscape alteration. During the past five years, she has studied the effects of extreme flow variability associated to hydroelectricity production and the potential of habitat enhancement solutions for Iberian cyprinids in flume conditions. She is particularly interested in understanding the flow components that trigger specific movement behaviour and physiological changes in freshwater fish.

Filipe Romão (Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Portugal) | Member

Filipe is a fish biologist with strong interests in the conservation and restoration of aquatic ecosystems biodiversity. He worked in the Portuguese Environment Agency during the implementation of the Water Framework Directive in Europe. Having to work with different biological elements allowed him to build a solid experience in river dynamics and ecological integrity. He is currently a post-doc researcher at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon. With over 12 year's experience, he spent most of his research career investigating freshwater fish ecology both in the field and laboratory, primarily assessing fish behavior and the efficiency of fishway designs for non-salmonid species.