Prof. Dr. Oscar Puebla takes over a joint professorship on Fisheries Ecology of ICBM and ZMT (Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research) by 1 October. Following his studies in Switzerland and Canada, he worked at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama where he spent a total of seven years as a postdoctoral fellow and associate scientist. Since 2014, the population geneticist was leading his own research group as a Junior professor at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel.

Since his PhD, Puebla continuously developed the hamlets, a group of simultaneously hermaphroditic reef fishes from the wider Caribbean, into a model system for his research. As a point of principle he complements molecular approaches with other disciplines. At present, he is involved in a EU BiodivERsA project on Marine Protected Areas that aims to link population genetics to the socio-economics of artisanal fisheries to address the evolution of egg trading in simultaneous hermaphrodites using economics trading theory.