Katie joins our lab from Ithaca NY, where she recently finished a postdoc in Matt Hare’s Lab at Cornell U. examining the performance of restored oysters along a salinity gradient in the Hudson River estuary. Katie is bringing her field ecology and physiology skills to study larval feeding physiology, examining how recurrent selection under a hatchery environment may alter important feeding or energy utilization traits in larvae. Katie is also working on optimizing the ‘Tag-seq’ RNAseq protocol, which we hope to use to profile transcriptomic differences among lines under different feeding regimes.

New project for the Plough and Pierson labs! Our proposal ‘Novel Genomic Tools to Assess Fish Diet and Prey Quality in the Choptank River’ was recently funded by MD SeaGrant along with a 2 year fellowship position! Very exciting. Plough lab part-time laboratory technician extraordinare Catherine Fitzgerald will be joining the lab as a masters student. Welcome to Catherine (though she has already been around for a while in many HPL labs!)

The lab is growing – Alexandra McCarty is starting her masters degree here at UMCES and will be working on our recently funded USDA project to examine the genetic basis of low salinity tolerance in oysters. Alexandra (Lexy) got her bachelors degree in biology from St. Marys College Maryland, and has been working at the NIH in Bethesda for the past 2 years in the Undiagnosed Disease Program Translational Laboratory. Welcome!!!

Also welcome to Ben Lee, also a very recent (2017) graduate of St. Marys College MD with a degree in Biology. He will be our new laboratory technician and will be working on a variety of projects including RADseq of blue crabs, river herring eDNA, and Spartina conservation genetics. Welcome Ben !!!