Rate My Professor Luciana Santoferrara

Her academic interests center on the ecology and evolution of ciliated protists and other microbes in marine plankton. Santoferrara examines protist biodiversity, biogeography, taxonomy, and responses to climate-related stressors including warming, deoxygenation, and hypoxia, particularly in estuarine systems like Long Island Sound. Her laboratory integrates field collections, high-throughput DNA sequencing, microscopy, and bioinformatics to study mixoplankton, trait-based ecology, and photic-aphotic distributions. She directs NSF-funded research initiatives and supervises students in the Hofstra University Summer Science Research Program. In the classroom, she instructs General Microbiology, Global Change Microbiology, Introductory Genomics and Bioinformatics, and Introductory Biology. Key publications include "Towards a trait-based framework for protist ecology and evolution" (2025), "The photic-aphotic divide is a strong ecological and evolutionary force determining the distribution of ciliates (Alveolata, Ciliophora) in the ocean" (2023), "Summer warming and deoxygenation shape estuarine microbial plankton across domains of life" (2026), "Environmental structuring of mixoplankton functional types within marine protist communities: a global analysis" (2026), and "A roadmap for equitable reuse of public microbiome data" (2025). She was awarded a POGO-SCOR Fellowship in 2010, serves on the editorial board of Ocean Microbiology, held an officer position with the International Society of Protistologists (2022-2023), and delivered an invited talk at the 2024 International Zooplankton Production Symposium.