Dr. Michelle Jungbluth is currently a Researcher at the San Francisco State University's Estuary and Ocean Science Center. She has a Bachelor's Degree in Biology from the University of Wisconsin Madison, and a M.S. and Ph.D. in Oceanography from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. After completing her Ph.D. she began exploring the complexities of food webs and wetland ecology in the San Francisco Estuary in the lab of Dr. Wim Kimmerer and continues there to this day.She is an ecologist, naturalist, oceanographer and marine biologist interested in the phenomena occurring at the base of aquatic food webs. In her career as a scientist she has focused on studies involving mainly zooplankton - the animals that "drift" in the sea. But they aren't just passive particles, they have unique behaviors that make them very interesting and important members of ecosystems. Her technical expertise includes characterizing life in marine and estuarine ecosystems through DNA barcoding, quantitative PCR-based studies of animal life history and food web connections, and next-generation DNA sequencing. She has also dabbled in DNA barcoding of deep-sea larval invertebrates, which is a location where we know almost nothing about organism diversity and even less about larval ecology.