Kelsey Yetsko

I've always been fascinated by how humans interact with and impact the marine environment. I grew up in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, which is a small coastal town surrounded by a diversity of natural environments, including barrier islands, estuaries, wetlands, beaches, and maritime forests. It's a town that is also heavily dependent on tourism and has undergone increased expansion and development over the last 10 years, which has fueled my desire to pursue research towards conservation and management of marine resources as part of my career.

I received my Bachelor's degree in Marine Science and a minor in Data Science from the College of Charleston, where I was involved in a variety of different projects: measuring swimming performance of two species of killifish exposed to different salinity treatments, developing a computer pipeline to produce models to search for repetitive sequences of DNA in a freshwater snail genome (which happens to be an intermediate host for the parasite that causes Shistosomiasis disease), and determining whether mating call characteristics of the male plainfin midshipman fish were correlated to male quality.

Currently I am pursuing my Master's degree at the University of North Florida, and my research is focused on estimating the amount of genetic variation present in thermal tolerance in colonies of the threatened staghorn coral. I am also looking at potentially correlating the survival of different colonies of this species to the gene or protein expression of various markers of cellular stress. This research will better inform coral reef managers of which colonies of this species would be better suited for outplanting into local populations in the face of climate change. I've recently presented preliminary data from this research at the Benthic Ecology Meeting (March 2016).

November 2016