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 Spanning from the molecular to the whole-organism level, research in our laboratory focuses on the energy acquisition strategies of organisms. In short, we are interested in how organisms make a living and the consequences of different energy acquisition strategies for ecosystem fluxes. Most of us work in the marine environment, but some prefer terrestrial & freshwater systems. Applying to grad school in biology? Here is a guide our lab developed. News: June 2025: Dr. Michelle Herrera had her paper on Cebidichthys violaceus micrbiomes finally come out in Ecological and Evolutionary Physiology! See our publications page. It is a thorough piece of work on how dietary shifts impact fish physiology and microbiome diversity! May 2025: Congratulations to Daniel Rankins on winning the Dr. William F Holcomb Scholarship from the School of Biological Sciences at UCI! This is a competitive award and speaks to Daniel's progress as a graduate student. April 2025: Spring feels good. Karina Brocco French had a paper accepted at Biological Bulletin. The work examines the sources of microbes for developing sea urchins (Strongylocentrotus purpuratus), showing that the water is the likely source (more so than food or vertical transmission from the parents). Look for that on our publication page in the near future. April 21 update: We are excited to announce that we will have a new doctoral student starting in the fall! Jessica Flores, currently at the LA County Museum of Natural History, will begin in the lab in September. Here is a little article about her work. She was an NSF GRFP Honorable Mention, which speaks to her amazing potential. We are excited to welcome Jessica into the lab! Valentina Peña, Daniel Rankins, and Newton Hood all presented their work at the Southern California Academy of Sciences meeting, which was at UCI on 25 April. It was a great meeting and all of their presentations went well. March 2025: A busy start to the new year. First, Daniel Rankins advanced to candidacy! Congrats on being a PhD Candidate Daniel! Next, we got the excellent news that Lyna Ngor (UCR) has been awarded a UCI Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellowship! This is huge. Although it is paid for by UCI, it is part of the UC President's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. So, this is big for our lab to be bringing in a stellar postdoctoral fellow, but it is also great for Lyna and her career. Then, Michelle Herrera had another one of her dissertation chapters accepted for publication in Ecological and Evolutionary Physiology. It is an amazing paper on how the microbiome and the physiology of C. violaceus responds to dietary perturbations. Look for that on our publications page once it is out online. Finally, we have a visiting graduate student, Isabel Villafuerte, from California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo, who will work with us over the summer. We remain productive in these trying times. October 2024: We are so excited to announce that Dr. Karina Brocco French (PhD 2024 from our lab) was selected as a NOAA Knauss Fellow in Marine Policy! You can read more about that here. It was always Karina's dream to work in science policy in the federal government and now she will be doing that in the legislative branch. When one wants to pursue a PhD, they can find the "perfect" fit from a research standpoint, but it may not be great from a mentoring standpoint. The mentoring matters so much. In this case, I have never worked in policy, but we catered the mentoring towards Karina's goals, and she is now pursuing her dream job. Enjoy the work, get the mentoring you need, and chase your dreams! September 2024: So many things have happened in the last six months, I hope I can get them all. First off, congrats to Dr. Matea Djokic! Dr. Djokic successfully defended her dissertation in August 2024. She is the sixth PhD from the lab. She expertly defended her work on microbiomes in stomachless fishes! She also won a Eugene Maughan Graduate Student Scholarship from the Western Division of the American Fisheries Society in addition to some other smaller awards. She is doing amazing! Next, Nefertiti Smith Christman won a Dissertation Year Fellowship from the American Association of University Women. This is a national level award and we are so happy for her! It allows Nefertiti to focus on her research in her final year. Then, Newton Hood won Best Student Presentation at the Western Society of Malacologists meeting in August. He delivered an excellent talk on dietary impacts on gonadotropin releasing hormone in red abalone. Finally, Daniel Rankins won a Rose Hills Foundation Science and Engineering Fellowship! This is a huge honor and comes with quite a financial boost. Way to go Daniel! This year is a good one in the lab! We welcome Valentina Peña, as she starts her voyage to earn her PhD. A new AI tool called Notebook LM (NotebookLM | Note Taking & Research Assistant Powered by AI) is doing crazy things. We put in German and Bittong (2009), and it returned an intelligent podcast on the paper. It is kind of scary. You can listen to that here. March 2024: Dr. Michelle Herrera (PhD 2023) was just awarded a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellowship to work at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (UCSD)! This is very exciting. The Chancellor's Fellowship comes with all the same benefits of the UC President's Postdoctoral Fellowship, so this is huge for Michelle's advancement and career. Congrats, Michelle! Kaitlyn Steinmann was awarded a Undergraduate Research Oppotunity Program Travel Award to present her poster at the American Physiological Summit in April 2024 in Long Beach! Her poster is on digestive enzyme activities in prickleback fishes with different diets. See you at the APS Summit! Dr. Beck Wehrle (PhD 2018) will start as a tenure-track professor at LeMoyne College in New York in July! Congrats to Beck! Finally, Valentina Peña will join the lab as a PhD student in the fall! You can read about Valentina's current position here: Research Scholars… | The Graduate School of the Stowers Institute February 2024: Special day! Dr. Karina Brocco French defended her PhD and did an amazing job. Her dissertation was on how the microbiomes of sea urchin larvae change across ontogeny and in response to the pollutant TBT, which is in antifouling paints and persists in the environment. She also did an amazing meta-analysis on what we know about TBT globally. She is the 5th PhD from our lab, and is on the market for a policy position. Onward and upward for members of our lab! These are the recent news stories. Check out the "People" page for links to each person's personal page, which will have more individual news. We are always recruiting graduate students. Please contact Dr. German if you are interested in pursuing your PhD in Nutritional Ecology and/or Marine Biology at UCI. Are you an undergrad interested in doing research in our lab? Bio 199 Application |
