Biography

Melanie is a marine evolutionary biologist specialising in (epi)genomics and transcriptomics in fishes. She received her BSc, MSc, and PhD from the University of Kiel, Germany, where she studied the compensatory effects of transgenerational plasticity on climate change-related stress. As a postdoc, she shifted her focus from micro- to macroevolutionary scales, investigating rapid speciation processes in Caribbean reef fishes (Hypoplectrus spp.), first at the Gurdon Institute in Cambridge, UK, and later during a fellowship between the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research in Germany. At UCF, Melanie is part of the “DISKER” project, which maps the spatial distribution of dispersal events (dispersal kernels) to predict population dynamics and improve marine spatial planning efforts.