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 his current position as an Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina in 2014. He's not exactly sure when mollusks became his muse, but it probably dates back to childhood battles with marauding garden slugs and gruesome attempts at homemade calamari. |
Post-doctoral Scholar
|
Alex Kingston
Alex got her BS from Arizona State University. She received her PhD from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she studied extraocular photoreception with Tom Cronin. Alex joined the Speiser lab in the Fall of 2015 where she began studying the molecular, structural, and functional complexities of dispersed visual systems in chitons and scallops. Alex also studies the co-evolution of weaponry, armor, and vision in snapping shrimp. Alex enjoys (studying, not eating) crayfish, molecular biology, coffee, making messes, and logic. |
PhD Student
|
Dan Chappell
Dan got his B.S. from Ohio University. He is currently working on his PhD at USC. studying the neurobiology of eyed chitons. He is interested in the neurobiology underlying dispersed visual systems. Dan enjoys rock climbing, injecting chitons with fluorescent dyes, and being another Dan in the lab. |
MSc Student
|
Natalie Sanchez
Natalie graduated from the University of Pennsylvania ('16). with a major in Biology, a minor in psychology, and interests in conservation biology and ecology. As a MSc student at USC, she is studying the effects that environmental stressors experienced during larval development, particularly in the form of temperature variation along elevational gradients, have on the visual ecology of butterflies. She is particularly focusing on differences in the visual processing ability, eye size, and wing morphology of the insects in response to their developmental environment. She is also interested in how changes to these factors may affect interactions between interspecifics, particularly as it relates to mate recognition. |
Undergraduate Researchers
|
Lauren Kunselman
Lauren is a senior at USC majoring in Marine Science with a minor in Neuroscience. She is interested in the neurobiology of marine organisms. Her current research focuses on the neural processing of visual information in the Florida fighting conch. Lauren studied abroad for a semester at Swansea University in Wales and plans to pursue a graduate degree in biology. |
|
Courtney Rulison
Courtney is a senior at USC majoring in Biology with a minor in Chemistry. Her research project concerns the behavioral and visual ecology of scallops. In particular, she is studying how scallops respond to novel objects by detecting them visually, and then extending their sensory tentacles to touch and taste them. During Summer '18, Courtney spent two weeks with the Dogs of Chernobyl project, assisting with biological research in the exclusion zone. She hopes to become a veterinarian. |
|
Rebecca Lucia
Rebecca is a junior at USC studying biology and marine science. Her current work in the lab deals with visual systems in snapping shrimp. She is currently using behavioral experiments to study their visual acuity will later investigate their spectral sensitivity. She is planning to attend graduate school and continue research in the marine science field. |
|
Alex Siegfried
Alex is a junior in the USC honors college. He’s majoring in chemical engineering with a minor in Biology. His current research project focuses on extracting and identifying different pigments expressed in the shell plates of chitons. His next project will concern how chitons are able to biomineralize their radulas with magnetite. He’s done research in the Speiser lab during the 2017 and 2018 summers and hopes to continue that trend. He plans on going to medical school. |