Maria Pia Miglietta obtained her Bachelor and Masters Degrees in Biology and Ecology at the University of Lecce, Italy where she worked on biodiversity surveys and hydrozoan ecology and taxonomy in the Mediterranean Sea. During her Ph.D. at Duke University she worked on a number of topics that ranged from life cycle evolution in marine invertebrates, to evolution of calcium carbonate in Cnidaria, to multi-gene phylogenetic reconstructions and systematics. Maria Pia is currently a Marine Science Network Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. She is working on life cycle evolution and ecology of Hydrozoa across the Isthmus of Panama and on Hydromedusae blooms in the Panama Bay. She is generally interested in understanding the interactions between ecology and evolution in marine organisms.