Principal Investigator

Dan Speiser
Dan is a graduate of East Lansing High School ('99) and Carleton College ('03). He earned a PhD as a member of Sonke Johnsen's Sensory Ecology lab at Duke University ('10) and was a post-doc in Todd Oakley's Evolutionary Biology lab at UC Santa Barbara (2011-14). Dan started as an Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina in 2014 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2020. He's not sure when  mollusks became his muse, but it probably dates back to childhood battles with marauding garden slugs or a magical encounter with an Aplysia in an undergrad invert bio course.

PhD Students

Nick Steichmann
Nick got his BA in Biology from Augustana College in 2018. He is currently working on his PhD at USC, investigating the roles the accessory eyes of caridean shrimp play in light-influenced behaviors and dynamic color change. In particular, he is curious how these structures influence camouflage and predator avoidance. He is also interested in analogous systems in other taxa, such as the parietal eyes of reptiles. Nick is an outdoors enthusiast who enjoys camping, fishing, scuba diving, and hiking with his dog.
Maddy Janakis
Maddy graduated in 2020 from DePaul University with a BS in Biology and Environmental Science. She is currently a PhD candidate in her fourth year at USC. Maddy researches how crab vision is suited to dynamic light conditions using color and polarized signals. She's also interested in crab behavior in different contexts. She loves her cat, Frankie, her turtle, Al Capone, and, of course, her extended family of crabs. Maddy enjoys Glee, ghosts, Kesha, beach days and driving her fellow lab members to the brink of insanity. Find her on twitter @JanakisMaddy !
Adriana Halvonik-Sanchez
Adriana graduated from the University of Costa Rica in 2022 with a BS in Biology. She is currently working on her PhD at USC where she is studying the ecological niches and evolutionary history of a group of closely related chitons that coexist throughout the Americas. She is also developing a bilingual field guide for the taxonomic identification of chitons in Central America. In her free time, she enjoys cooking, exploring tidepools in rocky beaches, and spending time with her cats, Toe Beans and Andrew, and her dog, Camo.

Undergraduate Researchers

Adara Grant
Adara is a senior Biology major with a minor in Spanish. They have worked in the lab with optomotor behavioral experiments to determine visual acuity and polarization sensitivity of mud crabs and porcelain crabs and are currently helping PhD candidate Maddy Janakis develop and run experiments that test the visual and learning abilities of crabs through their abilities to solve mazes. After graduating, they plan on going to graduate school for aquaculture and fisheries science. In their free time, they enjoy thrifting, learning more about fish and being outdoors, and taking their cat for walks.
Keyonne McKnight
Keyonne McKnight is a senior Biological Sciences major and a Japanese minor. She is researching behavioral associations between mud crabs (Panopeus herbstii) and snapping shrimp (Alpheus heterochaelis) to see if they have a mutualistic relationship based around burrow construction and defense. She plans on becoming a veterinarian or working in animal science/veterinarian medicine research. In her free time, she enjoys hanging out with her dog and her friends, and volunteering at the animal shelter to interact with other animals.
Isabelle Paris
Isabelle is a senior Environmental Studies major at USC graduating in December '23.  In the lab, she helps PhD candidate Maddy Janakis with optomotor behavioral trials and watches mud crabs run in circles under different colored lights. Post-graduation, she will be attending graduate school for marine biology in hopes of working in marine mammal rehabilitation. On campus, she spends most of her time participating in research and going on trips with the Gamecock Surf Club or Mountaineering and Whitewater Club. Outside of school, she loves reading, photography, bumming around the beach, and cuddling with her two kittens.