Maya Gomez

Maya Gomez is a 3rd year PhD student and NSF GRFP fellow in Dr. Carly Kenkel’s Cnidarian Evolutionary Ecology Lab at the University of Southern California. Her dissertation focuses on the morphological plasticity of reef-building corals–the ability for corals to change their growth formations in response to changes in the environment. She has extensive experience with photogrammetry, and has developed a high throughput, fully automated photogrammetry processing pipeline that utilizes custom scripts to remotely process hundreds of Metashape 3D models using USC’s high performance computing system. Her work has resulted in reduced generation time for higher quality models, as well as expedited downstream phenotyping through the integration of custom scale bars during the imaging and model building processes.

The integration of photogrammetry technology and molecular approaches is foundational to Maya’s research, as she takes a multi-scale approach to decipher the mechanisms underpinning morphological plasticity at colony, polyp, and cellular-levels. By building connections between these scales of organization and the underlying mechanisms, she aims to link small-scale patterns of plasticity with the large-scale processes providing valuable ecosystem services. Her work not only informs our understanding of biological function and organization but can also be directly applied to reef restoration through a greater understanding of genotype and environment-based growth and performance. She regularly applies her work to reefs throughout the Caribbean as part of the Perry Institute for Marine Science, who she remains affiliated with.

Maya has presented her work at multiple conferences, including as an invited speaker for the Feel the Flow: How Water Movement Shapes Organisms and Ecosystems symposium at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology conference in early 2024. Maya graduated from Middlebury College in 2020 with a B.A. in Biology and Spanish.

May 2024