Current lab members

Graduate Students​

PhD Student: Emily Adamczyk (she/her)
Co-supervised by Laura Parfrey

I am interested in how phenology influences temporal dynamics in seagrass ecosystems. This information may help us find “windows of opportunity” to restore critical seagrass habitat. Additionally, I want to investigate how anthropogenic stressors, such as ocean acidification and climate change, affect seagrass biodiversity and ecosystem functions.

Check out Emily's personal website here.

MSc Student: Matt Cristensen (he/him)

Reducing carbon emissions and sequestering carbon from the atmosphere is key to mitigating climate change. Blue carbon refers to the carbon sequestered by coastal marine habitats and Canada has the longest coastline in the world. My research aims to collate the extent of Canada’s eelgrass habitat mapping and quantify the blue carbon sequestered there. Through this research I hope to 1) advance the understanding of carbon storage drivers in eelgrass habitats and 2) link conservation and protection of sensitive coastal habitats to climate mitigation and coastal resource management.

I’ve joined the lab with 10 years of experience in conservation working predominately on BC’s Coast for Ducks Unlimited Canada as well as volunteering with Friends of Semiahmoo Bay Society.

PhD Student: John Cristiani (he/him)

I'm interested in how dispersal connects nearshore habitat and what this means for biodiversity patterns and maintenance. I seek to model landscape-scale patterns of community connectivity by simulating movement with biophysical models. This work will help to identify marine areas of high conservation value to prioritize for management.

PhD Student: Kaleigh Davis (she/her)
I am an ecologist interested in the application of fundamental ecology to conservation issues. I explore this through two main research avenues. First, I use ecological theory in combination with lab and field experiments to understand how temperature affects nutrient availability, and downstream consequences for aquatic community structure and function. Specifically, I consider biological nitrogen fixation as a mechanism for temperature sensitive nitrogen supply to photosynthesis. Second, I use field surveys and experiments to study drivers of eelgrass ecosystem degradation over the past four decades in James Bay, Quebec. I work on a collaborative team with scientists from all over Canada and local Cree experts to understand the current abundance and distribution as well as the capacity for eelgrass recovery in the Bay.

​Outside of my research, I also run the Conservation Discussion Group and am active in UBC’s sustainability community. Check out Kaleigh's personal website here.

PhD student: ​Mairin Deith (she/her)
Co-supervised by Jedediah Brodie

In tropical forests across the globe, people rely on wild meat for their food security. With growing human populations, increasing demand for wild meat is pushing hunted species to extinction in some of the poorest researched terrestrial environments. I develop data-limited metrics and software to (1) predict where hunted species face the greatest risk of hunting, and (2) assess the sustainability of traditional, community-lead harvest strategies.

I am also an advocate for open science and computer literacy. When not writing my own code, I teach code as a coordinator for Let's Talk Science, where I run a free after-school coding club, and as a workshop leader with the UBC Learning Exchange. 

​Check out Mairin's personal website here.

PhD Student: Coreen Forbes (she/her)

I study how species’ traits interact with environmental gradients to determine patterns of diversity using experimental and observational approaches. Using experimental manipulations of temperature in a freshwater zooplankton system, I explore the mechanisms of thermal response. In these experiments, I determine how responses to temperature propagate from lower to higher levels of biological organization by comparing thermal response at the level of organismal metabolism, resource consumption, population growth rate and competition between species. I also use observational studies in eelgrass-associated invertebrate communities to explore how spatial and environmental gradients interact with species traits to generate patterns of diversity at larger scales. By linking ecological theory to controlled experiments to patterns observed in nature, I aim to contribute to our understanding of biodiversity across scales and now biological systems may respond to a changing climate.

PhD Student: Maggie Slein (she/her)

I am interested in marine resilience across scales of biological organization. I seek to better understand how marine organisms, populations, and communities cope with variable conditions in the environment, most recently temperature, using fieldwork, empirical work, quantitative synthesis, and theory.

PhD Student: Keila Stark (she/her)

Accurately predicting how marine faunal populations will respond to warming seas is critical to informing management plans. An existing approach to achieving this is modeling future species distributions based on estimated thermal tolerance ranges from current distributions, however this misses other ecological pathways (ie. trophic) through which warming might affect a taxon of interest. I am interested in investigating how warming might influence the abundance and distribution of Arctic char (Salvelinus alpinus) via temperature effects on its prey abundance through trophic and metabolic theory of ecology frameworks.

MSc student: ​Evgeniya (Jane) Yangel (she/her)
​Co-supervised by Laura Parfrey

My current research project focuses on microbes in freshwater systems. In particular, I want to understand how food web organization and climate change together affect bacterial community structure and what predators are primarily controlling bacterial abundances. This work will allow to assess future ecosystem health under global warming by parameterizing models that will take into account a higher number of trophic levels in the community.​

Visiting PhD Student: Minako Ito

​My research focuses on comparing two seagrass species, eelgrass Zostera marina and dwarf eelgrass Z. japonica. While both species often coexist in intertidal habitats around BC, Z. marina is native and Z. japonica is non-native and is introduced from Japan. I am interested in how invertebrate communities differ between two seagrass species. Also, I am interested in how those relationship changes 1) over time and 2) in different sites/regions. In my ultimate goal, I would like to compare temporal and spatial variability between Z. marina and Z. japonica in BC to variability in Hokkaido, Japan, where both seagrass species are native.

Postdoctoral Research Fellows

Tess Grainger, PhD (she/her)
Postdoctoral Fellow

I'm interested in understanding the ecological and evolutionary processes that shape the natural world, and in determining the effect that global change is having on these processes. I use lab and field experiments with study systems ranging from microbes to insects to plants to explore these topics. These days I'm particularly interested in understanding the effects of temperature on rapid evolution and coexistence. My current project will use experiments with flour beetles (Tribolium castaneum) to determine how temperature affects species’ ability to rapidly adapt to deteriorating environmental conditions.
Check out Tess' website here.

Devin Kirk, PhD (he/him)
Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow

I am a quantitative ecologist broadly interested in how environmental stressors, especially those related to anthropogenic change, impact host-parasite interactions. The majority of my research focuses on developing a better mechanistic framework for predicting how climate change will alter infectious disease at both the individual and population levels. My work is typically an iterative process of mathematical modeling and conducting ecological experiments, where I generate data to parameterize models across environmental factors, make predictions, and then test key ecological theory by confronting my predictions with data.

Edward Tekwa, PhD (they/them)
Hakai Coastal Initiative Fellow

I am a quantitative ecologist focusing on complexity, regime shift, and extinction across biotic communities and socioecological systems. In my current research, I attempt to synthesize microbial and macro-organismal data using body size, biomass, and diversity at different taxonomic level, in order to understand underlying ecological, evolutionary, and socioeconomic forces.

Check out Edward's personal website here.

Jacob Usinowicz​, PhD (he/him)

I am an ecologist interested in understanding the natural processes that shape current and future patterns of biodiversity. I use ecological theory and experiments to understand the current abundance and distribution of species, and forecast what will happen as environmental change reshuffles natural communities. In my current work in the O’Connor lab, I am developing a new theoretical framework to understand how impacts of climate change on individual species can cascade through food webs via species interactions. A primary goal of this theory is to unite our understanding of population dynamics and energetics into one framework to jointly consider their importance for species persistence. I draw on theoretical developments across disciplines as diverse as physics, chemistry, and computation that use statistical (information) entropy as a basis to model complex dynamical systems.

Check out Jacob's personal website here.

Matt Whalen, PhD (he/him)
Hakai Coastal Initiative Fellow

My research focuses on understanding the Influences of environmental variation on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning across scales. I use a combination of experiments and observations to test how heterogeneity in environmental conditions influences biodiversity and rates of ecological processes. My work spans multiple systems and explicitly considers how environment-biodiversity relationships change from fine to course scales, both in time and space. Recent examples of my work include experimental tests of how topographic variation at small to large spatial scales influences community assembly on rocky shores and observations of how recruitment in seaweed and animal communities varies across habitat types along a wave exposure gradient. 

​Check out Matt's personal website here.

Lab technicians

Felipe Amadeo (he/him)

Alexis Bangayan (she/her)
Lab technician, 5th year undergraduate, Honours in Biotechnology UBC&BCIT

I’m currently working as a lab technician, and mainly helping Matt Christensen with his “Blue Carbon” project to quantify soil carbon sequestered in Canada’s eelgrass meadows. Growing up in the Philippines, there was always an emphasis on protecting marine ecosystems and biodiversity. Although I am in the field of biotechnology, ecology/marine biology is also an interest of mine. Moving forward, I hope to apply the knowledge and skills I’ve gained to contribute to the environmental biotechnology industry.

Carling Gerlinksy (she/her)
Lab manager/technician