Welcome Entering Class of 2019!

Six students are entering the JPBO in Summer and Fall 2019. Most of them spent their summers in Woods Hole conducting research and will be taking classes up in Cambridge this fall. This year’s talented class will be engaging in diverse fields of research that we look forward to hearing more about over the next five years. In the meantime, here are some tidbits about each of them.

Seth Cones graduated from Ohio University with a B.S. in Marine & Freshwater Biology and a certificate in Geographic Information Systems. His undergraduate research focused on the microhabitat preferences of timber rattlesnakes. Seth is joining Dr. Aran Mooney’s Sensory Ecology lab to investigate the environmental drivers of squid habitat use and behavior, with an emphasis on how squid energetics vary under different temperature, oxygen, and salinity regimes. Outside of the lab, you could run into Seth at WHOI’s soccer and softball leagues or along the bike path walking his favorite resident pups.	Arinanna Krinos graduated from Virginia Tech in May 2019 with degrees in Biological Sciences, Computer Science, and Computational Modeling and Data Analytics, with a minor in Mathematics. She spent her undergraduate years researching everything from lobster physiology, to atmospheric carbon dioxide modeling, to molecular biology and bioinformatics for disease ecology, to lake ecological modeling of phytoplankton blooms. While in college, she was also Editor-in-Chief of a student-run engineering magazine, Engineers' Forum, and spent a lot of time on science/environmental outreach. Outside of her work in the lab and at school, Arianna enjoys scrapbooking, kayaking, cooking, and swimming. Arianna is working with Harriet Alexander and Mick Follows in the Joint Program, with the goal of integrating bioinformatics and modeling techniques for understanding marine phytoplankton. With the help of the Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (CSGF) from the US DOE, Arianna plans to make use of high performance computing and model/algorithm development as much as possible to tackle the questions she is interested in.
Alexandra (Lexi) Jones graduated from Temple University with a B.A. in Mathematics and Minors in Physics and Business, where she worked in an evolutionary genomics lab studying Drosophila evolution. She entered the oceanography world after working on two projects with NASA using satellite remote sensing to study phytoplankton and temperature changes in the California Current System. Lexi is currently a student in the Follows lab at MIT and in collaboration with the Sosik lab at WHOI studying phytoplankton ecology and productivity. In her free time she enjoys being outdoors, advocating for sustainability, playing board games, and creating art.	Miraflor Santos graduated with a B.S. in biology from NYU Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. As an undergrad, she studied the genetic diversity of phytoplankton and bacteria along the Abu Dhabi coast with Shady Amin. She previously worked in Matt Long’s lab looking at the ebullition of bubbles from seagrass meadows and in Heidi Sosik’s lab as a PEP student and returned to Woods Hole as a summer student fellow to study the diversity of plankton on the Northeast U.S. Shelf. She will be returning to the Sosik lab as a PhD student. Mira enjoys paddle boarding, hiking and cooking.
Jane Weinstock graduated from Smith College in MA with a B.A. in Geoscience and a minor in Biology. During this time, she developed a particular interest in invertebrate larval dispersal and settlement, and she has since worked on projects exploring these processes in both the Gulf of Maine and the Caribbean coast of Panama. Now a member of the Pineda Lab, she is focusing on the physical and environmental factors that affect larval supply (particularly of barnacles). Outside the lab, she enjoys baking, reading, cartoons & comics, and latin music & dance.	Ciara Willis received her BSc.H. from Dalhousie University in Marine Biology (Co-op) with minors in Statistics and Ocean Sciences. She has previously worked in larval ecology, fisheries economics, and microbial ecology. She is now a member of Simon Thorrold’s Fish Ecology lab at WHOI where she studies twilight zone food webs and their application to fisheries management. Outside of the lab, she loves to read, hike, and travel with her husband, Matt.