Annick Wilmotte

Annick Wilmotte is a botanist by education but worked on the biodiversity, taxonomy and biogeography of cyanobacteria since her Master thesis at the University of Liège (Belgium). She is now a Senior Research Associate of the Belgian Funds for Scientific Research (FRS-FNRS) at the University of Liège. In 1998, she discovered that cyanobacteria were the main photosynthetic microorganisms in Antarctic biotopes, and followed them in aquatic and terrestrial habitats on the continent. She is a scientific expert to the Belgian delegation in CEP since 2008, and tries to stress the importance of protecting the microbial communties that are often neglected. In addition, she is directing a public collection of cyanobacterial strains (BCCM/ULC) that focus on polar cyanobacteria. She is vice-secretary of the Belgian National Antarctic Research Committee, of the SCAR Life Sciences and Ant-ICON.

Current research projects / interests:

• MICROBIAN
• HabitANT
• BCCM/ULC public collection of cyanobacteria