Copepods are dominant members of pelagic zooplankton communities with significant impacts on marine ecosystems. They harbour many parasites, but how they affect copepods is poorly understood.
As part of POICE, I study the microeukaryotic community of parasites associated with copepods. My PhD includes field and experimental work, with a particular focus on employing metabarcoding (genetic detection) for this purpose.
Key areas:
- Marine biodiversity and ecology
- Field work, metabarcoding and associated molecular lab methods
- Bioinformatics and programming (R, python, bash)