Rui Caldeira

Rui Caldeira is a Principal Research Scientist acting as Chairman of the Board at the Madeira Agency for the development of Science, Technology, and Innovation (ARDITI). He completed his PhD at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA, USA) in September 2002. Prior to that, he concluded a B.Sc. and Master degrees at the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom, on Ocean and Applied Marine Sciences.  He had post-doctoral experiences at the University of New South Wales, in Australia (2003), and at the ‘Instituto Superior Técnico’ from the Lisbon Technical University (2006). In 2009, he was contracted in a competitive FCT Fellowship by CIIMAR (U. Porto). Besides having more than 50 scientific articles published in the peer-reviewed literature as well as over 100 participations in international conferences, Rui’s main contribution focused on the study of island-induced wakes. He’s considered by some a ‘world expert’ in this topic and he is currently participating in several active projects in USA, France, Spain, and Brazil.  He is often consulted to review scientific journal articles and proposals from the National Science Foundation (USA) in this topic. He taught undergraduate and Master courses at UCLA, at the ‘University of Las Palmas of Gran Canaria’, University of Porto, and at the ‘Universidade Técnica do Atlântico’ (UTA, Cape Vert). Since 2015, Rui was elected the Director of the Oceanic Observatory of Madeira (OOM), currently funded to promote the digitalization of the ocean circumscribing the Madeira EEZ.