Keynote speakers

CSG MOROCCO 2026 > Keynote speakers

Catherine Carr

Catherine Carr is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland. She earned her B.S. (Hons.) in Zoology from the University of Cape Town in 1977 and her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from UC San Diego in 1984 under Walter Heiligenberg. After receiving the Society for Neuroethology Young Investigator Prize that year, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Mark Konishi at Caltech, studying sound localization in barn owls. She was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 1988 and joined the University of Maryland, College Park in 1990.
Her research focuses on temporal coding in birds and reptiles, and she has also worked at the Marine Biological Laboratory. She directed the Neural Systems and Behavior course (2000–2004) and the Grass Foundation Lab (2005–2008). Honors include the Humboldt Senior Research Prize (2004, 2011), election as Fellow of AAAS (2012) and of the International Society for Neuroethology (2018), and an honorary doctorate from the University of Southern Denmark (2015). She served as President of the Grass Foundation (2018–2024) and is now a Life Trustee.

José Carlos Brito

José Carlos Brito, PhD in Biology (2003, University of Lisbon), is Principal Investigator at CIBIO/University of Porto and leads the BIODESERTS group (Biodiversity of Deserts and Arid Regions). His research, developed over more than two decades, explores desert wildlife and its ecological and cultural value, with fieldwork extending from Morocco and Mauritania to Saudi Arabia and Iran. He has led 47 expeditions, accumulating over 1,300 days of fieldwork in more than 10 countries and covering nearly 300,000 km across desert landscapes.
His main research lines focus on biodiversity distribution patterns, evolutionary and landscape processes, and conservation planning. Author of over 220 scientific papers and Editor of Amphibia- Reptilia, he is committed to bridging science and conservation through public lectures, media outreach, and major biodiversity projects in Saudi Arabia aimed at establishing new protected areas and advancing desert research.

Jérémy Lemaire

Dr. Jérémy Lemaire is a behavioral ecotoxicologist the Department of Behavioral and Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna, Austria, where he studies the influence of anthropogenic activities on heavy metal contamination in tropical rainforests and its impacts on biodiversity. His work focuses on the complex interactions of metals in the environment and the cascading effects on wildlife.
By using wildlife as bioindicators, he assesses the fate and biodistribution of metals in the environement and their impact on the individual and population levels. Top predators such as crocodylians are a particular focus of his research.