Shawna A Foo Australian Marine Sciences Association 2022

Shawna A Foo

Shawna Foo is a marine scientist interested in factors that increase the resilience of marine ecosystems to climate change. Shawna graduated with a BSc (Adv) (Hons) from the University of Sydney, co-majoring in Biology and Anatomy and Histology. She completed a PhD in 2016 on the adaptive potential of sea urchins to ocean warming and ocean acidification at the University of Sydney with Prof Maria Byrne. After her PhD, she was awarded an Endeavour Postdoctoral fellowship and moved to Italy to work with Dr Maria Cristina Gambi at the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn where she used natural seawater carbon dioxide vents as windows into the future for studying the effects of ocean acidification. She then moved to the Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford to work with Prof Ken Caldeira, learning a new model system, the anemone Aiptasia. She then worked with Prof Greg Asner, the director of the Centre for Global Discovery and Conservation Science at Arizona State University, integrating satellite based coral mapping with benthic surveys to allow an upscaling of reef monitoring in the context of resilience and recovery of coral reefs after warming. Most recently, she was awarded a 2022 ARC DECRA Fellowship and 2022 Westpac Research Fellowship to identify factors that counter negative impacts of ocean climate change.