Esteban Ramírez Chueca, PhD, is a botanist and postdoctoral researcher at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. His work explores how halophytes—plants able to thrive where salinity excludes most vegetation—diversify, adapt and persist in changing environments. Combining field botany, herbarium collections, taxonomy, phylogenomics and ecological modelling, he studies the evolution and biogeography of Salicornioideae and saline plant communities across coastal and inland ecosystems. He previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard University Herbaria in collaboration and currently maintains an associate appointment with Harvard’s Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. He has authored more than a dozen peer-reviewed papers and book chapters on halophyte systematics, ecology, conservation and biosaline applications.