Dr. Erik-jan Malta, is Head of the Department of Applied Research and Innovation and researcher at CTAQUA. He studied Biology at Leiden University (The Netherlands) and obtained his PhD in Science at Radboud University Nijmegen (The Netherlands). He has more than 20 years of experience as a researcher and private consultant in the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal and Australia in marine ecosystem and seaweed ecology and seaweed cultivation and applications. He has been PI of various nationally funded research projects on seaweed blooms, seaweed cultivation and applications, in particular in aquaculture feeds. Furthermore he has been work package coordinator and researcher in the BIOSEA H2020-BBI project. Currently, he is the PI of the project INNOVALGA, leading a consortium of four Spanish partners into the cultivation and use of micro- and macroalgae as human food and animal feed. Furthermore, he is actively involved as researcher in the H2020 project SIMBA, the Intereg Atlantic Area projects INTEGRATE (integrated multi-trophic aquaculture, IMTA), ACCES2SEA (seaweed cultivation) and the Interreg POCTEP project AQUA&AMBI-II (also mainly IMTA). He is also co-leader of work group 2 of COST action SeaWheat (CA20106) on Ulva and chair of the first international SeaWheat conference in Cádiz in September 2022. In his role of Department Head at CTAQUA, he is supervising the execution of all of its publicly financed R&D projects. He has published >25 papers in peer-reviewed journals (H-index = 19) as well as contributions to book chapters and various technical reports; he is member of the editorial advisory board of the international journal Aquatic Botany, editor applied phycology of the bulletin Algas of the Spanish Phycological Society and research topic co-editor Marine Biotechnology of the international journal Frontiers in Marine Science.