Dr. Michael Hart, Associate Professor, Marine Population Biology

People in the Hart Lab

Carson Keever, PhD student

Carson came to us in 2004 from Rick Grosberg’s lab at UC Davis where she did everything from ants to anemones, and cloned a few microsatellites along the way. Now she studies microsatellite and mtDNA population genetics in bat stars and teaches invertebrate biology.

Jennifer Sunday, MSc student

Jenn joined the lab in 2005 from UBC and the Vancouver Aquarium. She studies genetic and reproductive differentiation between populations of the northeast Pacific bat star Patiria miniata.

Susana Patino del Olmo, PhD student

Susana just started at SFU in 2006. She has MSc (CINVESTAV) and BSc (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico) degrees in marine ecology, but we are bringing her over to the dark side of molecular population biology. She is interested in the evolution of genes that encode proteins involved in gamete recognition and fertilization in sea stars.

Dr. Liz Stockwell, Postdoctoral Researcher

Liz has a BSc in Biology and Spanish from Amherst College and a PhD in Zoology from Tom Daniel's lab at the University of Washington. She studied the ecology, biomechanics, and evolution of tropical New World leaf-nosed bats (Phyllostomidae) at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute field station at Barro Colorado Island in Panama. Liz was a postdoc in Sharon Swartz’s lab at Brown University. She also has extensive teaching experience with the Organization for Tropical Studies (tropical diversity & ecology) and with the Dalhousie University integrated science program.

Gone but not forgotten...

Manon Cassista, MSc (2006)

Manon is a fisheries population biologist at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Dartmouth, NS. She studied spatial and temporal genetic variation using microsatellites in the Arctic surfclam Mactromeris polynyma.

Dr. Jason Addison, PhD (2004)

Jason studied phylogeography, patterns of historical gene flow, and age structure in a circum-Arctic sea urchin (Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis). He is now a postdoc in Grant Pogson’s lab at UC Santa Cruz, where he uses new population genetic markers for analysis of population structure and ancient hybridization among Strongylocentrotus species.

Dr. Fiona Harper, PhD (2004)

Fiona studied morphological, reproductive, and population genetic features of a north Atlantic hybrid zone between sister species of Asterias sea stars. Fiona was a postdoc in Paul Rawson’s lab at the University of Maine, where she studied hybrid zone evolution using molecular techniques in Mytilus mussels. She is now an assistant professor in the Biology department at Rollins College in Florida.