am an aquatic ecologist with an interest in studying the factors
responsible for controlling the distribution and abundance of
planktonic organisms found in lakes and ponds. My research interests fall into three main areas:
I use a mix of field experiments, synoptic surveys, and time series analyses to test and refine hypotheses.
- Assessing the potential impacts of environmental change on aquatic communities
- Understanding the factors that influence community responses to environmental stressors
- Understanding the impact of dispersal and colonization processes on the distribution and abundance of plankton species
I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California Santa Barbara. My supervisor at NCEAS is Dr. Stephanie Hampton. My
postdoctoral research will evaluate the effects of climate change on
endemic plankton communities in one of the world’s largest lakes: Lake
Baikal, Siberia. Using a unique 60-year data set I will determine the
main environmental drivers of zooplankton community dynamics and
evaluate whether endemic species are likely to be replaced by common
cosmopolitan species. My analyses will contribute to a collaborative
project aimed at evaluating the potential impacts of climate change on
the food web of this distinct ecosystem.
|I completed my Ph.D. in the Department of Biology at Queen's
University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
My advisor was Professor
Arnott, and my research examined the factors that control the response of freshwater
zooplankton communities to environmental stressors. I used
zooplankton communities in Boreal Shield lakes recovering from
anthropogenic acidification as a model system for this research. While
past research focused predominantly on local factors (water chemistry,
biotic interactions) as the main determinants of zooplankton community
structure, my Ph.D. research demonstrated that landscape-level
processes, such as dispersal, also play an important role.
||I conducted my M.Sc. research at the
Institute for Environmental Research at
the University of Windsor, in Windsor, Ontario. My advisor there was
Hugh MacIsaac and
my research focused on controlling the spread of nonindigenous (exotic)
species via ships' ballast water. As part of my M.Sc. research I
conducted laboratory and ship-based experiments that tested the role of
ballast water exchange in preventing the introduction of invasive
species. This work influenced the development of policy for ballast
management in the Great Lakes due to its inclusion in several policy
reports such as the
US National Research Council report on Great Lakes
Shipping Trade and Aquatic Invasive Species.
I also contributed to literature reviews on invasive species in the
Great Lakes basin and the use of genetic tools to identify the
geographic sources of these species.