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Biography
Dr Colette Feehan, post doctoral fellow, earned her B.Sc. at the University of Alberta where she worked with Rich Palmer, a Friday Harborite from the 1970s and Sally Leys. Her Ph.D. is from Dalhousie University, with Bob Scheibling. Colette’s dissertation work centered on the population regulation of sea urchins in Nova Scotia, which suffer periodic disease outbreaks. Colette helped identify the amoeba agent and then found a key correlation with the occurrence of hurricanes. Because sea urchins in this system control subtidal kelp forests, mass mortalities of urchins cause a ‘phase shift’ in benthic communities. Colette will continue to work with urchins while at FHL but will veer away from disease work and take advantage of the rich local knowledge of larval ecology (i.e., Richard Strathmann!) to study early life-history processes.