Meet Ashley Gonclaves, Cnid-Immunity Lab’s newest PhD Student

Hi everyone, I am new to the Cnidarian Immunity lab and just joined this past spring 2020 – I am super excited to get involved and happy to be part of this helpful, ambitious group of scientists! I hope you enjoy this “sealfie” I took years ago (2016) while doing work in the Antarctic, and this picture of me proudly showing off my mud collection (soil samples, 2019) during some work I performed in the salt marshes of New Jersey.

My entry into the study of ecology in the context of climate change began during my time in the Antarctic when I participated in the West Antarctic Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program. There, I saw firsthand the effects that the changing climate has on the West Antarctic ecosystem; penguin species composition in the region has changed dramatically, and plankton communities have been fundamentally altered. I later performed work back home in NJ, where I assessed how climate change and sea level rise are affecting coastal mosquito communities.

All along the way, however, I have dreamed of one day doing work in coral reefs. This was my original dream when entering the fields of the marine sciences as a college student. I am looking forward to investigating coral reef ecosystems, particularly disease in the context of climate change.