Ever since my first dive and my discovery of the underwater world, I’ve been passionate about aquatic life; whether it’s about marine or freshwater environments. I’m particularly interested in studying fishes. I completed an internship on eel behavior in a large lake and studied how it changed as migration cues appeared. My master’s thesis was done on fish aesthetics, and how we can link aesthetics to functional diversity among other things. We were also able to create a model to calculate the aesthetic value of a location based on the composition of the fish community. It was particularly interesting to change scale and go from studying individuals, to a population, to a community. My PhD project is going to focus on fish communities. I will be attempting to model fish abundance based on the presence/absence of fishes and species co-distribution and then evaluate the predictions on an empirical dataset.

Publications to date:

PLOS Biology 2022: The aesthetic value of reef fishes is globally mismatched to their conservation priorities

Animal Biotelemetry 2023: Spatial ecology of translocated American Eel (Anguilla rostrata) in a large freshwater lake