Principal Investigator
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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 attempts at making homemade calamari. |
PhD Students
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Dan Chappell
Dan got his B.S. from Ohio University. He is currently working on his PhD at UofSC. Dan studies the neurobiology of animals with distributed visual systems such as chitons and scallops. Dan enjoys rock climbing, injecting chitons with fluorescent dyes, and being another Dan in the lab. |
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Nick Steichmann
Nick got his BA in Biology from Augustana College in 2018. He is currently working on his PhD at UofSC, 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. |
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Maddy Janakis
Maddy graduated in 2020 from DePaul University with a BS in Biology and Environmental Science. She is currently working on her PhD at UofSC. Maddy is interested in the functions of different predator avoidance mechanisms and their evolutionary histories. She enjoys biking, running and long, philosophical conversations with her turtle, Al Capone. |
Undergraduate Researchers
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Tyler Horan
Tyler is a junior in the UofSC Honors College studying biology and neuroscience. He has studied the many-eyed visual system of scallops through behavioral experiments. For his current project, he is asking if associative learning can be retained through autotomy in brittle stars. He plans to attend graduate school and continue research within the field of neuroscience. |
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Loann Koch
Loann is a 3rd year Marine Science undergraduate at UofSC with a particular interest in physical oceanography. His efforts in the lab involve computational modeling and data visualization. Loann loves to partake in the hardcore outdoor trips, and he meets on the soccer pitch weekly. He wants to dedicate his work to learning and using new technologies to study ocean and atmospheric processes. |