Current Opportunities
Undergraduate
General opportunities for undergraduate experience in my lab are outlined on the undergraduate information page.
Graduate
General opportunities for a graduate career in my lab are outlined on the graduate information page.
Projects for which there are currently vacancies and funding, are listed below.
(1) CLIMATE CHANGE, INVASIVE SPECIES, AND CONSERVATION IN MARINE LAKE ECOSYSTEMS.
An 8-years long, ongoing, study of marine lakes in Palau is generating biological
and physical limnological data plus information on local weather that reveals
ecosystem dynamics correlate with climate variables describing the El Niño
- Southern Oscillation (Martin et al. 2005) and potentially climate change.
Funding is available to support graduate work focusing either, or both, on [i] continuing fieldwork and [ii] developing mathematical and/or
computer models of ecosystem responses to changes in local weather (linked to
climate variables) and also potentially species introduction and different management
strategies. Modelling projects will be supervised in conjunction with Faculty in Applied
Mathematics, the Center for Computational Biology, and/or Environmental Systems.
(2) REVSYS: RENAISSANCE
TAXONOMY OF SEMAEOSTOME SCYPHOMEDUSAE Ð A SYSTEMATIC FOUNDATION FOR UNDERSTANDING
JELLYFISH BLOOMS & INVASIVE SPECIES.
Approximately 63 morphospecies of semaeostome jellyfishes, divided among 19
genera and three families, are currently described world-wide. The low taxonomic
diversity purportedly reflects low levels of endemism and a high proportion
of cosmopolitan species. However, recent molecular analyses suggest 2-to-10-fold
greater species diversity in many genera and changes to long-standing phylogenetic
hypotheses.
Our
goals are [i] to generate a robust approach to species identification and description
for semaeostomes employing, at least in part, morphological information and
[ii] to make the approach accessible to biologists who need accurate identifications
in the field. Our objectives are: [a] Inventory existing natural history collections
of all known species of semaeostomes from diverse geographic locations, including
the type localities whenever possible. [b] Use collections to establish methods
for collecting data suited to rigorous statistical comparative morphological
analyses of medusae. [c] Use existing collections that are suitably preserved
to generate a robust phylogeny based on DNA sequencing of 2 mitochondrial and
4 nuclear markers. [d] Integrate morphological and molecular data to [a] identify
morphological characters, or suites thereof, that can be used to reliably identify
semaeostome species and [b] revise the systematics of species in the three semaeostome
families including publishing new species descriptions. [e] Develop tools that
use the new systematic framework to improve the accuracy of future systematic
research. [f] Make these tools widely available to enable non-specialists to
use morphological characters to accurately identify semaeostomes in the field.
This
project is a collaboration between the Dawson lab and Dr. Allen Collins (Smithsonian
Institution).
Post-doc
General opportunities for post-docs in my lab are outlined on the post-doc information page.