My scientific career started during my second year of master (2003-2004) at the department of Geology and Oceanography of the University of Talence (Bordeaux, France). During my internship, I developed a strong interest for the fields of paleoceanography and paleoclimatology under the supervision of Jacques Giraudeau (webpage). My master thesis aimed to reconstruct the dynamics of the North Atlantic Ocean circulation during the Holocene (the last ±10.000 years) through the detailed analysis of coccolithophore assemblages (marine calcifying planktonic microalgae) from a marine sedimentary archive retrieved in the eastern Norwegian Sea. The results of this work were published in 2 scientific articles: Solignac et al. (2008) and Giraudeau et al. (2010) (see section B.1 for the list of references). Each of these studies document millennial-scale modulation of the main currents of the North Atlantic and a major reorganization of the surface circulation patterns during the Holocene.
In October 2004, I started a PhD thesis under the supervision of Luc Beaufort (webpage) at the European Center of Environmental Geosciences (CEREGE, Aix-en-Provence, France), continuing the in-depth study of how coccolithophore assemblages can be used to reconstruct past climate variability at different temporal (seasonal to millennial) scales. More specifically, I studied the impact of climate variability (El Niño Southern Oscillation) and climate change (rising atmospheric CO2) on the assemblages of coccolithophores. The results of my thesis were published in 4 scientific articles: Grelaud et al. (2009a, 2009b) and Beaufort and Grelaud (2017) on the impact of El Niño and Beaufort et al. (2011, Nature) on the decrease of the mass of coccolithophores calcite as a result of atmospheric CO2 concentrations increase. During the last year of my thesis I have been teaching (degree, master) at the University of Aix-Marseille III (France) mainly in the field of geology (see section G.2 for more details). After the defense (December 2008), I have been contracted by the CEREGE for 6 months as analyst in oceanography and I was in charge of oceanographic database and satellite data analysis.
In 2009, I started a postdoc, in the group of Patrizia Ziveri (webpage) at the ICTA-UAB, on the regime shift of Mediterranean phytoplankton and zooplankton communities associated to climate change. Since then, I mainly worked on the impact of ocean acidification and ocean warming on Mediterranean calcifiers as a result of anthropogenic climate change (Bonomo et al., 2012; Horigome et al., 2014; Milner et al., 2016; Mallo et al., 2017; D’Amario et al., 2017, 2018, 2020) and past climate change (Grelaud et al., 2013; Balestrieri et al., 2021). From 2012 to 2014, I have been contracted as a research support technician at the ICTA-UAB. I was (and still am) in charge of SYRACO, an automatic system of coccoliths recognition, which measures the size and mass of individual coccolith (the inorganic fossil remains of coccolithophores). In addition to laboratory work, I gained experience in the field of data management as I was in charge to collect, compile and store the data produced in the frame of the European FP7 MedSeA project (coordinator P. Ziveri). After this contract and a period of unemployment of 7 months I started a new postdoc at the ICTA-UAB in 2015 during which I continued my research on marine calcifiers and climate change.
In 2017, I diversified my activity as I became the scientific coordinator of the European Interreg Med BLUEISLANDS project dealing with the seasonal variation of waste generation in Mediterranean islands as an effect of tourism, focusing my research on marine litter and microplastics (Simon et al., 2019; Grelaud and Ziveri 2020). In this context, I set and developed the Micrroplastics Extraction Laboratory (MEL) at the ICTA-UAB. In September 2020, I started a new international project (i-plastic, coordinator P. Ziveri) aiming at quantifying the fluxes of micro- and nanoplastics from the land-ocean interface to the open ocean. In this project I am in charge of the coordination of the work package 1: in-situ observation, dealing mainly with the seasonal sampling of micro- and nanoplastics in 3 estuaries (the Cocó estuary in Brazil, the Mondego estuary in Portugal and the Ebro estuary in Spain).
I have participated in 17 articles published in international journals, including very recognized such as Nature, Science of the Total Environment, Scientific Reports, Quaternary Science Reviews. I am co-author of 5 papers under review (2 in the field of paleoceanography, 1 dealing with marine calcifiers and climate change and 2 on microplastics). My h index is 12 and I have 620 citations (Scopus). Since 2009, I have participated directly to competitive national and international projects: MedECOS (FP6 CM20004365-E), MedSeA (FP7-265103), Interreg Med BLUEISLANDS (IMED15_3.1_M12_273), CALMED (CTM2016-79547-R) and i-plastic (PCI-2020112059). At academic level I have co-supervised 9 master thesis and 1 doctoral thesis, and I am currently co-supervising 1 doctoral thesis.
In 2016 and 2019 I cumulated 5 months of paternity leave.