Seminars

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Barbara Spiecker (she, her, hers) is a deaf marine ecologist at UCSB who is broadly interested in scale-dependent responses of marine communities across space and time. She uses mathematical and statistical tools coupled with experiments and field observations to answer questions related to responses of marine communities to climate change and monitoring and management of marine habitats. She is a co-founder of a non-profit, Atomic Hands that focuses on making science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) engaging through American Sign Language (ASL), empowering the signing community to develop and deliver engaging STEM topics and encourage networking among deaf STEMists. She has a Ph.D. in Integrative Biology from Oregon State University, M.S. in Marine Biology from Northeastern University, and a B.S. in Biology from Rochester Institute of Technology.

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Dr. Olavo Marques is an observational oceanographer interested in how waves and turbulence interact with the ocean circulation. He is originally from Brazil, where he got his bachelor of science in oceanography from University of Sao Paulo, and then came to the US where he did his PhD at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). In his PhD research, he used observations from Tasmania to study how deep-ocean internal tides impinge on complex topography over the continental slope and drive near-bottom turbulent mixing. He is currently a postdoc at the Naval Postgraduate School and the UCSD, where he is studying how surface surface waves and coastal processes are impacted by rocky environments, such as those found throughout central California.

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Dr. Cyronak runs the Coastal Carbon Laboratory (CCL) in the Institute for Coastal Plain Science at Georgia Southern University. Research in the CCL focuses on the carbon cycle in coastal ecosystems such as estuaries, marshes, coral reefs, mangroves, and seagrass beds. We are interested in the role that these ecosystems play in the global carbon cycle, how they will be affected by climate change, and what role they can play in carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere. Learn more about the CCL: www.coastalcarbon.org.

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My research interests are Earth history and the evolution of life, and the interactions between the biosphere and the geosphere. As such this research can generally be considered paleontology, insofar as paleontology encompasses all aspects of the history of life. My research incorporates multiple lines of evidence, and multiple tools, to investigate questions in the history of life. These lines of evidence include fossil data, molecular phylogenetics, sedimentary geochemistry, and ecological and physiological data from modern organisms. Ultimately, the goal is to link environmental change with organismal and ecological response through the lens of physiology.

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Dr. Veronica Vriesman is a marine scientist with broad interests in climate change and biomineralization. She studies connections between mollusc shells and ocean changes through time. She is especially interested in environmental impacts on bivalve biomineralization, and how we can use shell archives to reveal past environmental conditions over seasonal to millennial scales. Veronica earned her PhD in 2022 from the Ocean Climate Lab in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department at UC Davis. As an NSF Graduate Research Fellow, she studied the shell of the culturally and ecologically significant California mussel to evaluate its utility as a paleoceanographic archive. Veronica is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geosciences at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio.

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Dr. Patrick Martone is a professor and phycologist in the Botany Department at the University of British Columbia (UBC). For nearly twenty years, Patrick has been studying the biology and biodiversity of seaweeds in the NE Pacific. Research in his lab focuses on a wide range of topics from cell wall chemistry and tissue development, through ecophysiology and evolution, to ecological interactions and community structure. Patrick is passionate about teaching the wonders of seaweed, inspiring hundreds of students at UBC and the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre. He has developed a mobile app for iPhone and Android called the “Seaweed Sorter” that helps users identify (and fall in love with) more than 100 seaweed species along the NE Pacific coast. Patrick is the Vice-President / President-Elect of the Phycological Society of America.

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Mike Jacox is a physical oceanographer working for NOAA at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Monterey, CA and the Physical Sciences Laboratory in Boulder, CO. His primary research focus is on physical-biological interactions in the ocean and their connections to climate, particularly in the northeast Pacific. Recently, he has focused on ocean variability and change off the US West Coast, including extreme events such as marine heatwaves, and the response of marine ecosystems from phytoplankton to top predators. Dr. Jacox is currently leading new efforts to develop end-to-end assessments of climate impacts on US west coast fisheries, including seasonal forecasts and centennial-scale projections of ocean conditions, distributions of targeted and bycatch species of interest to US fisheries, socio-economic impacts of changing living marine resources, and evaluations of fisheries management strategies in a changing climate. He holds a Ph.D. in Ocean Sciences from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Colorado.

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Bridgette Clarkston is an Associate Professor of Teaching at the University of British Columbia and avid algae enthusiast. For 17 years, Bridgette has been studying, teaching and communicating about algae to scientific peers, university students and the general public. One of her proudest professional achievements has been to co-author the field guide, Pacific Seaweeds: A Guide to Common Seaweeds of the West Coast, with her long time mentor and friend, Dr. Louis Druehl.

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Dr. Alison Gould is a Research Scientist at the California Academy of Sciences studying the critical, yet complex, relationships between marine organisms and bacteria. Her research primarily focuses on bioluminescent symbiosis between fish in the Siphamia genus and luminous bacteria in the vibrio family. This highly specific and tractable vertebrate-bacteria association is providing new insights into the mechanisms that regulate the formation and maintenance of microbial symbiosis from an evolutionary scale down to the molecular level.

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Roxanne Banker is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Nevada Las Vegas working with Dr. Carrie Tyler. She is broadly interested in how ecological interactions at multiple scales of biological organization affect organismal and community responses to climate change in modern and ancient ecosystems. For her seminar, she will focus on her recent postdoctoral work reconstructing food web networks and examining community structure from fossil communities spanning the Mesozoic Marine Revolution, a period of time ~250 to 65 Million years ago (Ma) during which marine communities experienced marked increases in functional diversity and primary productivity..