About the Speaker
Arturo A. Massol-Deyá is the executive director of Casa Pueblo de Adjuntas, a community-based group with 38 years of services in natural resources conservation, education, and sustainable development. A graduate of the public school system (1986) and the University of Puerto Rico (1990), he obtained his doctoral degree from the Center for Microbial Ecology at Michigan State University in 1994. Since then he has been a faculty member at the Department of Biology of the University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez Campus where he established the Tropical Microbial Ecology Lab. He has been a principal investigator of projects on microbial ecology with emphasis on biological processes aimed at restoring contaminated environments. He study microbial diversity associated to plant communities and in extreme contaminated sites like at the former US Navy bombing range in Vieques with the use of molecular microbial ecology tools. After the direct impact of Hurricane Maria over Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017, Dr. Massol-Deyá, together with Casa Pueblo, has led a community aid response that aims to change the energy landscape of a country dependent on fossil fuels to one based on renewable energy sources.