Meet Rene

Hello! I am a third year Marine Biology PhD Candidate at the University of Maine, based out of Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. I am part of the Maine EPSCoR project Maine-eDNA, co-advised by Doug Rasher and Damian Brady.

I’m interested in the effects that climate change has on our ecosystem, how organisms adapt to this change, and what this means for our future. For my PhD, I am studying the kelp forests of the Gulf of Maine, using field work, molecular lab work, and bioinformatics to determine about how these foundation species are responding to our changing climate.

Prior to my PhD, I worked as a research assistant at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution for three years. While there, I worked in two labs - John Stegeman/Jed Goldstone’s Environmental Toxicology Lab as well as Annette Govindarajan’s Molecular Ecology Lab as part of the Ocean Twilight Zone project.

Even before that, I earned my M.S. in Computational Biology as well as my B.S. in Biological Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. I was a member of Veronica Hinman’s Evolution, Development, and Regeneration Lab, and successfully defended my thesis in 2016.

Before any formal higher education, I fell in love with the ocean, the salt marsh, and marine organisms as a young kid. That excitement and awe grew into a passion while volunteering at Massachusetts Audubon Society’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary. It was this experience - conducting juvenile horseshoe crab studies, oyster reef restoration studies, and monitoring diamondback terrapin nests - that made me realize I wanted to study our natural environmental for the rest of my life.