Heather Bracken-Grissom

 

Dr. Heather Bracken-Grissom is a marine biologist that studies biodiversity from shallow tropical waters to extreme environments including the deep sea, hydrothermal vents and aquatic caves.  Her current research seeks to understand how organisms have adapted to life in darkness and how they use bioluminescence, the generation of light by an organism, to survive.  For her entire career she has lead Decapod Tree of Life projects to study the origins, evolution and diversification of crabs, lobsters and shrimps. More recently, she has combined genomic methods with advanced technologies, including robotics and autonomous sampling, to investigate ‘invisible DNA’ and improve our understanding of underwater migration and community dynamics.  Dr. Bracken-Grissom has led or participated in over 30 research cruises across the Gulf of Mexico and Pacific, searching for novel life and new sources of bioluminescence.  In June 2019, she was part of the research team that captured the first live video footage of a giant squid in US waters, and this summer she will explore some of the deepest hydrothermal vents using the human-occupied submersible Alvin.  Due to her taxonomic expertise, she has two species named after her, a mesophotic reef hermit crab (Cancelllus heatherae) and deep-sea bioluminescent shrimp (Acanthephyra heatheri).

    

Growing up in northern California surrounded by rocky shorelines and tidepools, her love for invertebrates was born. Initially, this passion arose from childhood curiosity but persisted throughout graduate and postdoctoral studies and into her present position as a Professor at Florida International University (FIU) and Assistant Director of the Coastlines and Oceans Division within the Institute of Environment.  She has a B.Sc. in Aquatic Science from the University of California-Santa Barbara and a Ph.D. in Evolutionary Biology from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.  

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