Rui Caldeira is a Principal Research Scientist acting as Chairman of the Board at the Madeira Agency for the development of Science, Technology, and Innovation (ARDITI). He completed his PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA, USA) in September 2002. Prior to that, he concluded a B.Sc. and Master degrees at the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom, on Ocean and Applied Marine Sciences. He had post-doctoral experiences at the University of New South Wales, in Australia (2003) and at the ‘Instituto Superior Técnico’ from the Lisbon Technical University (2006). In 2009, he was contracted in a competitive FCT Fellowship by CIIMAR (U. Porto).

Besides having more than 50 scientific articles published in the peer-reviewed literature, as well as over 100 participations in international conferences, Rui’s main contribution focuses on the study of island-induced wakes. He taught undergraduate and Master courses at UCLA, at the ‘University of Las Palmas of Gran Canaria’, University of Porto, and at the ‘Universidade Técnica do Atlântico’ (UTA, Cape Vert).

Since 2015, Rui has been the elected Director of the Oceanic Observatory of Madeira (OOM), which is currently funded to promote the digitalization of the ocean circumscribing the Madeira EEZ.

Rui will be presenting 'Autonomous Ocean Observations of the Madeira EEZ' at the MAD-Deep Symposium.