Sara Swaminathan

 

Sara Swaminathan, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Scientist at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in East Boothbay, Maine, where she studies coral reef community resilience and the ecological impacts of environmental stressors like disease and deoxygenation. She earned her PhD in Environmental Engineering Sciences from the University of Florida, where her dissertation examined the responses of coral reef communities, from microbes to fish, to environmental change.

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Sara's research explores how coral reef communities respond to and recover from major disturbances, including Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease and ocean deoxygenation. Her work combines extensive field-based research, drawing on hundreds of research dives throughout the Caribbean, molecular approaches, and statistical modeling. Her published findings have shown how disease and environmental stress can indirectly reshape entire reef communities, and how coral hosts and their microbiomes respond differently to stress depending on their prior environmental history.

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More broadly, Sara is interested in understanding coral reef resilience across scales, from the physiological responses of individual coral holobionts to the restructuring of entire benthic and reef fish communities, with an eye toward informing effective conservation and restoration strategies. Her current work focuses on understanding the dynamics of herbivorous coral reef fish diets and how they shift as reefs degrade.

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Sara is also active in science outreach and education, facilitating Girls Who Code programming in Maine and developing educational games about coral reef ecology for high school students. She strives to bridge rigorous ecological science with public engagement, expanding how we understand and protect coral reef ecosystems in a rapidly changing ocean.

 

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Presentation: Sunday, October 25th

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