I received my PhD in Biological Oceanography from the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island in 1988. My dissertation looked at the photo-physiological differences in three species of phytoplankton that explained why they bloomed at different times of the year. During my time as graduate student I developed and patented an instrument for measuring dissolved oxygen in unstirred algal cultures that I used in my experiments.
After graduating from URI I accepted a post-doc position at Columbia University with Dr. John Marra. With him I worked on a Navy funded project looking at bioluminescence and the propagation of light through the water column. During my years at Columbia I worked on many projects including measurements of open ocean primary production using the dissolved oxygen sensors I had developed as a grad student, a study of the effect of El Nino on primary production in the Indonesian Seas, hypoxia events along the New Jersey coast, the effect of Gulf Stream meanders on primary production off the US east coast, and a study of the effect of ocean acidification on corals conducted at the Biosphere 2 Center in Oracle, AZ.
In 2005 I came to RSMAS at the University of Miami because I wanted to get involved in graduate and undergraduate teaching and because RSMAS has long been a Mecca for coral reef research. During my time at RSMAS I have supervised six PhD students and undertook research looking at the effects of ocean acidification on many aspects of coral biology and physiology including fertilization success, settlement, growth of juvenile and adult corals, heterotrophy, photosynthesis and respiration. Currently I am supervising two PhD and two MS students. I teach Introduction to Marine Biology Lab and Research Fundamentals to marine science undergrads and Tropical Marine Ecology and Field Techniques to RSMAS graduate students.
My research has two main focuses. I have NSF and NOAA funding to do yearly cruises to map the acidification and deoxygenation of the world oceans. My other research focus is the study of how the stress of ocean acidification interacts with heat stress on the physiology of corals. For several years, the lab has been conducting studies of the physiology of Acropora cervicornis at increasing temperature (26, 27, 28, 29 and 30C) trying to experimentally find the bleaching threshold temperature. Currently we have it bracketed as lying between 30.0 and 30.5C. We have also done several experiments above the bleaching threshold (31.5 and 32.0C) to study the time-dependent response of bleaching and mortality.
