Bernabé Santelices González
Chile has one of the most remarkable diversities of seaweed on the planet. He described it, and discovered two genera and ten species no one had seen before.
Pelillo, luche, cochayuyo, huiro — these are Chilean seaweeds, food staples, export goods and the direct livelihood of thousands of harvesters and divers. To science they are also, along the Chilean coast, among the strangest systems on Earth: organisms that reproduce and disperse in ways unlike anything on land.
Santelices devoted his entire career to understanding them. He discovered two genera and ten species that nobody had described before.
Reproduction, dispersal, recruitment, biogeography
He was born in Calama on 1 December 1945 and qualified in 1966 as a State Teacher of Natural Sciences and Biology (Profesor de Estado en Ciencias Naturales y Biología) at the Universidad Católica. His undergraduate thesis already dealt with identifying seaweed species from northern Chile: he never changed subject again. He earned his doctorate in botanical sciences at the University of Hawaii and returned to the Universidad Católica, where he was a full professor from 1982.
His speciality was the life history of macroalgae: how they reproduce, how their spores travel, how they settle on the substrate — what ecologists call recruitment — and how they are distributed along the coast. That knowledge is the technical basis for managing benthic resources: without knowing how a seaweed bed replenishes itself, any extraction quota is an invented number.
Natural Sciences, 2012
for his contribution to the development of marine ecology and marine botany
Ruling of the jury for the 2012 Premio Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (Chile's national prize for the natural sciences), chaired by minister Harald Beyer, translated from Spanish
The ruling also described him as a world expert in the reproduction, dispersal, recruitment and biogeography of macroalgae. His response, on 31 August 2012, was to share the credit.
I feel a great deal of happiness and gratitude. Behind each of these prizes there is a regiment of people who have helped…
Bernabé Santelices, on the day of the announcement, translated from Spanish
- President of the CONICYT Council (2015) and Science and Technology adviser to the Ministry of Economy.
- Full member of the Academia Chilena de Ciencias and of the Consejo Superior de Educación.
- First Marinalg International Prize in 1989 and 1995.
- American Phycological Society award (2000) for best paper of the year in the Journal of Phycology.
He died on 10 October 2023, aged 77.
What the sources do not quite settle
His second surname is González, not Villalobos.
This was checked expressly because the list of candidates with which this research began carried the wrong surname. The Universidad Católica, the Spanish Wikipedia and academic sources agree on González.
He was born in Calama on 1 December 1945 and received the Premio Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in 2012.
Official Premios Nacionales record from the Universidad Católica, plus press coverage from 31 August 2012.
He published more than 160 scientific papers.
The Universidad Católica gives «more than 160»; another source gives 155. The institutional figure was preferred.
The two quotes of his that appear on this page are complete.
Both arrived truncated in the press source, which cuts the sentence short. They are reproduced as found, with an ellipsis, rather than completed.
- Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Ficha oficial de Premios Nacionales, con el fallo del jurado
View source → - Radio Universidad de Chile (2012). Anuncio del Premio Nacional y declaraciones suyas
View source → - La Tercera (2012). Cobertura del premio
View source →
How to cite
This is free to reuse under CC BY 4.0, as long as you give credit.
FísicaEterna. (2026). Bernabé Santelices González — biography, FísicaEterna. Retrieved [access date] from https://www.fisicaeterna.cl/en/biographies/bernabe-santelices
@misc{fisicaeterna_bernabe_santelices,
author = {FísicaEterna},
title = {Bernabé Santelices González — biography, FísicaEterna},
year = {2026},
url = {https://www.fisicaeterna.cl/en/biographies/bernabe-santelices},
note = {CC BY 4.0}
}