Speakers

Andrea is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. Research in Andrea’s lab centers around describing fundamental mechanisms of salt, water, pH, and nitrogen regulation in aquatic arthropods—particularly those that thrive in peculiar and/or extreme environments—from septic tanks in urban areas to the deep sea. Our current interests aim to unravel how ‘marine’ insects, specifically salt-tolerant dipteran larvae, hydrate themselves when developing in the highly stochastic and hypersaline supratidal rock pools where salinity routinely exceeds many times that of normal seawater. We also use mosquitoes as a model for understanding the distinct functions of the numerous ammonia transporter genes that they express (more than any other animal described, to date)—which are critical for nitrogen excretion in larvae but have highly distinct roles in the adult mosquito (e.g. ammonia sensing to find hosts).

Andrea completed her graduate training in the lab of Dr. Andrew Donini at York University (Toronto, ON) where her interests in the physiology of ammonia transport across life history strategies of mosquitoes were first piqued. She extended these interests to the marine environment, where she completed an Inclusive Excellence Fellowship at the University of Toronto Scarborough with Dr. Cosima Porteus focused on describing the impacts of ocean acidification on the sense of smell of Dungeness crabs. Andrea next went a bit deeper—to the pelagic, deep sea—where she completed a NSF Postdoc fellowship at the University of Miami with Dr. Martin Grosell describing the physiological mechanisms that many cephalopods use to retain high levels of metabolically-produced ammonia to achieve buoyancy. It was during this period that Andrea was able to collect salt marsh-inhabiting mosquitoes, and she returned to her insect-y roots.