Please join SFDI Wednesday, October 5th, 2022, as we welcome Matt Nicholson, Marine Ecologist and currently a PhD candidate at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Sciences. Matt will briefly walk us through some of the highlights of his career in research thus far. Then, he will dive (pun intended) into the work that his current lab group does, including the studies he led during his PhD. Briefly, the main focus is studying the ways in which parasites impact both individual hosts as well as coral reef communities overall. They are a global research group, working in the Caribbean, Australia, Africa, and the Philippines (although his PhD work has “only” taken place in the Caribbean and Australia). He will talk about their main study species (gnathiids), touching on what they are, what they know about them, the studies they are currently working on, and why studying something so small is so important.
Matt was born in Miami, Florida and raised just North of that in Pembroke Pines, Florida. He completed his undergraduate studies at Florida Gulf Coast University, and his master’s degree in England at the University of Exeter. Throughout his career he has been fortunate to have worked in South Africa, Australia, Wales, as well as several Caribbean islands. He has also worked on a wide variety of study species including sharks, fishes, seabirds, jellyfish, and parasites. Matt’s research focuses mainly on foodweb ecology (also termed “trophic ecology”) as well as symbiotic relationships among species.
Simply put, Matt just loves to be blowing bubbles in the ocean. In fact, during field research season (where he dives almost daily) he will often spend his “days off” by going diving. He often says that he couldn’t survive in any other career because nothing else engages his mind and imagination in the same way as research. Also, getting to call the ocean your “office”, and a tank top and boardshorts your “work clothes”, is a sweet deal. In addition to his research, Matt is a big proponent of the “science communication” field, which specifically aims (among other things) to engage non-scientists in ways that are interesting and easily digestible. Since returning to live in Florida in 2021 for the first time in several years, Matt has enjoyed being back “home” and looks forward to beginning a postdoctoral research position here in Miami once he finishes his PhD later this year.
