Marine Community Ecology and Conservation

About Brian SillimanJay StachowiczJohn BrunoMark Bertness

Mark Bertness is Robert Brown Professor of Biology at Brown University. He was born in Tacoma Washington and grew up exploring the shores of Puget Sound. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Puget Sound in 1971. He has been at Brown University since 1980. Dr. Bertness is the author of Atlantic Shoreline Ecology: A Natural History published by Princeton University Press in 2006. His research focuses on the structure dynamics and conservation of shoreline communities--particularly salt marsh plant communities--and the sessile invertebrate and seaweed communities of rocky shores. John Bruno is a marine ecologist and Professor at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research is focused on marine biodiversity coral reef ecology and conservation and the impacts of climate change on marine ecosystems. He earned his Ph.D. from Brown University in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University in disease ecology. Dr. Bruno is currently working primarily in Belize the Bahamas Cuba and the Galapagos Islands. He is an avid blogger and co-developer of the oceans website SeaMonster. Brian Silliman is the Rachel Carson Associate Professor of Marine Conservation Biology in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. He holds both B.A. and M.S. degrees from the University of Virginia and completed his Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Brown University. Dr. Silliman was named a David H. Smith Conservation Fellow with The Nature Conservancy in 2004 and a Visiting Professor with the Royal Netherlands Society of Arts and Sciences in 2011. He has also received several awards including the Young Investigator Award from the American Society of Naturalists (2006) a Young Investigator Grant Award from the Andrew Mellon Foundation (2007) and a NSF Career Grant Award (2011). Dr. Silliman has published thirteen book chapters and over ninety peer reviewed journal articles and co-edited the book Human Impacts on Salt Marshes: A Global Perspective (with T. Grosholtz and M. D. Bertness 2009). Jay Stachowicz is Professor of Ecology and Evolution at The University of California Davis. He was born in Springfield Massachusetts and grew up exploring the shores of Cape Cod Bay. He received his undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College in 1993 and did his doctoral work with Mark Hay at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill studying the ecology and evolution of mutualistic interactions between crabs and their coral or seaweed host-plants. He has been at UC Davis since 2000. Dr. Stachowicz co-edited the book Species Invasions: Insights into Ecology Evolution and Biogeography published by Sinauer Associates in 2005. He was awarded the George Mercer Prize from the Ecological Society of America in 2004 and the UC Davis Academic Senate Teaching Award in 2012. He is also an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow.