Charlotte Havermans studied Biological Sciences in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, where she obtained her PhD in 2012 on the topic of evolutionary relationships of Antarctic and deep-sea crustaceans.

She has been working in Germany since 2015, where she obtained two German Research Foundation (DFG) postdoctoral positions at the University of Bremen. These projects focused on distribution shifts of plankton in polar marine ecosystems as a consequence of environmental changes, focusing on food web ecology, connectivity of species, and their resilience to warming waters.

Since 2019, she has led the “ARJEL – Arctic Jellies” Helmholtz Young Investigator Group at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven. The project aims to study the impact of jellyfish on changing Arctic ecosystems and fish stocks.

In April 2024, she took on a professorship in marine zoology at the University of Bremen. Her research goals encompass the application of different modern molecular and optical techniques, both in the field and in the lab, to study range shifts and adaptation of marine zooplankton to climate change and reveal the so far unknown links in marine food webs. To date, Charlotte Havermans has participated in fourteen field expeditions, several of which were onboard the Polarstern icebreaker.