Our Team
Meet the team working on the project!
Dr. Jennifer Sunday Lead Dr. Jennifer Sunday is an Assistant Professor at McGill University, specializing in marine ecosystem responses to climate change through species’ range shifts, changing ecological interactions, and evolutionary adaptation. In partnership with the Hakai Institute, Jennifer Sunday is currently exploring the use of environmental DNA for tracking marine biodiversity responses to global and environmental change. |
Emily Rubidge Co-lead Emily's research interests centre on increasing understanding of species’ responses to global change and the effectiveness of conservation tools to mitigate impacts. Current projects are focused on ecosystem-based approaches to management including ecological risk assessments, ecological monitoring and systematic conservation planning. |
Ryan Stanley Co-lead Ryan is a research scientist working with Fisheries and Oceans Canada at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. His research program focuses on the evaluation of marine conservation areas and the development of Scotian Shelf – Bay of Fundy regional conservation network. |
Matthew Lemay Collaborator Matthew is a Research Scientist at the Hakai Institute. His research interests are in the use of genetic approaches to study marine biodiversity. A major focus of his current research program is to optimize the use of Environmental DNA (eDNA) for monitoring the diversity of fish and invertebrates in coastal marine ecosystems. Matthew's role in this project is to lead the lab processing of our eDNA samples. |
Benjamin Millard-Martin PhD student Ben is studying how environmental DNA (eDNA) compares with traditional visual surveys in marine nearshore environments. He uses various approaches to ask how community assemblage patterns vary across space, time, and habitat types, in order to develop the eDNA approach for future long-term biodiversity monitoring. |
Eden Tekwa Post-Doctoral Researcher Eden is a transdisciplinary scientist developing dynamical theory, statistical method, and data synthesis. Their study subjects include marine ecology, global macroecology, fishery, socioeconomics, and the science of science. Currently they are focussing on developing bias correction methods for biodiversity metrics based on sampling methodology and spatial ecology. These methods will be applied to both survey and eDNA data in order to infer species richness across space, temporal trends, environmental causes, and optimal sampling protocols. |