Kristina officially starts as an Assistant Professor of Marine Mammal Science in the School of Marine Sciences on May 1. In this new position, Kristina will teach classes in marine mammals and ocean health, and build a research program focused on the ecology, evolution, and population health of marine mammal species in the Gulf of Maine and elsewhere.
Local environmental organizations provide a great audience and a fun venue to share our science with the general public. This evening, Kristina gave a talk entitled “Seal Populations on Maine’s Coast: then and now” to the Downeast Chapter of Maine Audubon in Ellsworth, Maine. With an interested and engaged audience of about 40 Audubon members and other community members, Kristina shared a brief history of Maine’s seals, tracking the changes in local seal population size and human perception from Native American subsistence hunting, to state-financed bounty programs, to more recent conservation and recovery.
Check out this news article on our recent open-access paper on marine mammal genomics. The paper, co-authored by a group of international marine mammal scientists, summarizes two recent workshops on marine mammal genomics held at the Society for Marine Mammalogy Biennial Conferences in 2013 and 2015. We review the primary options for generating genomic data, introduce several emerging techniques, and discuss the suitability of each approach for different applications in the study of non-model organisms. The original paper published in the Journal of Heredity can be found here.
