The Research Lab
Dr Christopher Cornwall
I am originally from New Zealand, and as a youth I spent a large portion of time around the sea fishing, snorkelling and spearfishing…
This passion for New Zealand’s rocky reefs drives a large amount of my research focus. I completed a MSc at Victoria University of Wellington in 2007. I commenced a PhD at the Department of Botany at the University of Otago in 2010, examining the capacity of seaweed to act as a refuge for ocean acidification for calcifying species. In 2013 I took up a Research Fellow position at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies in Tasmania, furthering this work. I then worked as a Lecturer at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies University of Western Australia node at the School of Earth Science and UWA’s Oceans Institute and Oceans Graduate School examining the calcification mechanisms in coralline algae. I have returned to Victoria University of Wellington after 11 years away, starting a 5-year Rutherford Discovery Fellowship funded by the Royal Society of New Zealand to start my own group at SBS focusing on New Zealand’s iconic kelp forest ecosystems. In July 2021 I started my role as leader of the Understanding theme in the Centre of Research Excellence Coastal People: Southern Skies.
Current students
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Erik did two stints with our group. He was our first intern at UWA, where he focused on the effects of different components of carbonate chemistry on coral and coralline algal physiology and calcification. At VUW his PhD has focused on understanding how coralline algal physiological traits combine to influence tolerance to multiple climate change drivers, using physiology, omics, and geochemistry. He will start a Post-doc at VUW in mid-2022 exploring seaweed restoration and construing his work on coralline algal physiology and responses of seaweeds to climate change. His BSc thesis was combined with geochemical techniques and published at Global Change Biology.
Primary supervisor: Chris Cornwall
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Luia’s thesis focuses on the effect of climate change and irradiance on the physiology of Caulerpa spp. The majority of her work has taken a multi-driver approach. She uses traditional physiological techniques and hopes to also explore proteomic responses toward the end of her thesis. On completion, Luia will go on to start a position as a Lecturer at the National University of Samoa.
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Katherine Marsh is a recent graduate of Victoria University’s marine biology undergraduate program. She is currently undertaking postgraduate studies with a focus on the dissolved inorganic carbon use of seaweeds on Wellington’s South Coast using δ13C and traditional surveys of abundance. Katherine originally hales from the United States but has lived most of her life in New Zealand.
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Denisa is currently working as a research assistant in our group exploring isotopic responses of seaweed exposed to different climate change scenarios, as well as exploring the effects of seasonality on seaweed from Wellington’s South Coast. One of her projects involves helping out with our current experiment into the effects of marine heatwaves with varying levels of duration and intensity on four New Zealand algal species. She is currently conducting a MSc majoring in marine biology, investigating the potential of coralline algae species to adapt to future climate change conditions over multiple generations.
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Laura was a summer research scholar working on brown macroalgae distribution in Wellington Harbour. She will be doing a postgraduate diploma in Marine Biology in the hopes of doing a MSc part 2 on something macroalgal-related. Her summer scholar research involved macroalgal restoration, both mapping possible restoration sites and growing sporophytes for cultivation.
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Kat will be doing a self-directed study that will be contributing to the Love Rimurimu project initiated by Mountains to Sea Wellington; a kelp restoration project focused in Wellington Harbour. She will be investigating how climate change impacts the giant kelp Macrocystis pyrifera. Juvenile giant kelp grown under temperatures ranging from 12–19°C, will subsequently be subjected to marine heatwaves with differing intensities, durations, and magnitudes. She will also conduct some small-scale surveys in the intertidal and shallow subtidal, to get an understanding of seaweed abundance within Wellington Harbour.
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Abigail was a Research Assistant for the Love RimuRimu project, co-supervised by Roberta D'Archino. In this role, she worked with NIWA to learn juvenile seaweed husbandry and wrote a seaweed nursery manual. The manual is specific to the Love RimuRimu project and will be a valuable resource for understanding how to set up and maintain a seaweed nursery cultivating native New Zealand species for the purpose of reforestation
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Imke’s thesis explores sponge-oyster dynamics of Bluff oysters and bio-eroding sponges that inhabit the oysters’ shell. Her project investigates the prevalence of this sponge across New Zealand oyster populations and the effects of sponge colonisation on the oyster. Two field experiments were set up in the Foveaux Strait to investigate sponge spread and oyster mortality. Further, she conducted lab experiments investigating the interaction of both organisms under climate change.
Completed students
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Yun-Yi worked as a summer research scholar currently working on macroalgal (Laminariales and Fucales) restoration. Her summer project including mapping historical distribution of macroalgae in Wellington Harbour, the South Coast, and the Wairarapa region of Wellington; and culturing macroalgae species in the lab to experiment with different temperatures and substrates of settlement at NIWA. Yun-Yi will begin as a research assistant in our group working with NIWA and seaweed restoration.
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JoAnna worked as a virtual intern based in the USA through University of Auckland. Her work assessed carbonate production across different coral reefs, amalgamating prior research form the literature with the goal of improving our understanding of how different processes contribute towards coral reef carbonate production.
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Wout worked with Chris to assess coral response types for calcification and photobiology under ocean acidification (OA). From our results we were able to (1) estimate the prevalence of linear versus tipping point responses for these key physiological traits and (2) test the idea that coral photobiology may benefit from OA. These findings make it easier to predict future coral responses to OA. Working on this project with Chris gave me a deeper understanding of the challenges corals face and equipped me with an improved skillset to study both reefs and other ecosystems. I am currently getting my doctoral degree at Cornell University in the US, studying speciation along the Hawaiian Islands. I plan to tie fundamental questions about speciation back to how corals evolve and diversify.
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Lena’s thesis explored foraminifera responses to climate change in a meta-analysis format.
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Riley worked as a virtual intern based in the USA. Her research involved conducting a meta-analysis of the effects of ocean acidification on sea urchins. She is graduating in September with a bachelor's degree, and in the following spring she will continue her research in conservation biology as she pursues a master's degree in the USA.
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Billy worked on two projects with us. Firstly, during an undergraduate internship as part of Malcolm McCulloch’s group at the University of Western Australia, where he started a multigenerational experiment that went on for 1.4 years. Following his BSc he completed an MSc in Tropical Marine Biology at the University of Essex, conducting MSc thesis research at the Observatoire Oceanologique de Villefranche with Steeve Comeau. He is currently studying for a PhD with renowned geneticist Timothy Ravasi at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. It was as part of this PhD that Billy completed his second project with us, following up on his initial work by analysing coralline algal conceptacles measured at VUW, that were produced during the multigenerational experiment. He published three high impact papers in his time with us:
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Evan worked on two projects with us as a virtual intern based in the USA and the UK. His main project was a meta-analysis assessing the responses of coccolithophores to the effects of ocean acidification. He also worked on amalgamating data on coralline algal calcification rates for a project started as a workshop led by Sophie McCoy. He is currently studying towards a Master’s in Physical Oceanography at University of Delaware.
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Darcie worked as a virtual intern assessing diatom responses to the effects of ocean acidification in a meta-analysis framework. Darcie is currently in her final year of her degree, focusing on biological applications of marine robotics. She is also interning for the University of Oxford’s Marine Conservation and Ecology research group, using structure-from-motion photogrammetry to study structural complexity and biodiversity of shallow and mesophotic coral ecosystems in the Seychelles.
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Maria worked as a virtual intern assessing crustacean responses to the effects of ocean acidification in a meta-analysis framework. She is now a PhD Student at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. We hope her work will contribute to a larger project on the impacts of ocean acidification cross all taxa.
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Francesca was hosted in our research group to carry out her MSc thesis. She explored the photosynthetic and calcification response of two different coralline algal species to the effects of ocean acidification.
Ashley Purdy (Intern, 2019)
Ashly was an intern based at our Coastal Ecology Lab (CEL), who assisted with a variety of different research projects. This included assessing the sizes of coralline algal conceptacles of individuals exposed for multiple generations to the effects of ocean acidification. Ashly also assisted with field work and analysed the contribution of different seaweed species in the high subtidal on Wellington’s South Coast. Some of this work was published – see link above in Billy’s profile.
Amelie Cosias (Intern, 2019)
Amelie was hosted at VUW and she assisted with our very first few experiments at CEL, assessing the impacts of different light levels on coralline algal calcification physiology. She was also involved in measuring coralline conceptacles from our multigenerational research. See the paper under Billy’s section.
Yann Tassin (Intern, 2019)
Yann was an intern based at CEL, he assessed the responses of coralline algal recruits to different light levels. Importantly, he also created the custom-made code our students now use in R to easily calculate total alkalinity with our current titrator.
Matt Bekeart (Intern, 2019)
Matt had two stints as an intern with us at CEL. Overall, his projects contributed towards measuring coralline algal conceptacles produced by individuals that were exposed to 8 generations of the effects of ocean acidification and ambient seawater. See Billy’s profile for the paper.
Daniel Cornwall (Intern, 2019)
Daniel worked on collating data to produce a meta-analysis of the effects of ocean acidification on coralline algal calcification. This work was published in Global Change Biology.
Ellis Larcombe (BSc thesis, Swansea University, 2018)
Ellis was hosted at the University of Western Australia, but also supervised by Cornwall during his first year at VUW. He primarily worked on the large multigenerational experiment, being the final student to work on that project.
Pouliquen Loïc (Intern, 2018)
Loïc was the first student at CEL. His project was using photo-quadrats to analyse changes in coralline algae, corals, sargassum and seagrass on coralline-algal dominated reefs due to marine heatwaves. His work will form part of a larger Australian wide research project that is still ongoing. He currently works on a land-based fish farm located in the south west of France. It is a recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) near the Atlantic coast. His work consists of maintaining a healthy environment for fish and ensuring optimal conditions for fish growth. In the future he would love to work on other type of RAS's such as aquaponics or switch back to aquarium-based corals.
Andrew Warnes (MSc, University of Western Australia, 2017)
Andrew’s thesis focused on understanding who coralline algae (Porilithon spp.) and corasl (Porites and Acropora sp.) from Ningaloo respond to increasing temperatures above the summer maximum they encounter under high and low irradiance regimes. Others then analysed the coral skeletons for δ11B and trace elements. His coral research was merged with that of PhD student Claire Ross, and this has recently been accepted in Communications Earth and Environment. He currently works as a laboratory coordinator at AIMS, managing a lab focused on the measurement of nutrients and carbon in seawater and sediments.
Quentin D’Alexis (MSc, Université Paris Sud, 2017)
Quentin’s thesis was based at UWA, and examined how corals and coralline algae from the Kimberley region from low and high variability pH environments respond to the effects of pH variability and ocean acidification. This work was published as three papers, see Billy’s profile above.
Kurt Giltrow (Intern, University of Western Australia, 2017)
Kurt was the fourth UWA based intern to work on the multigenerational experiment. Last we heard he was working in aquaculture in Geraldton. He obtained one paper from the work at UWA, published in Nature Climate Change.
Frankie Puerzer (Intern, University of Western Australia, 2017)
Frankie was based at UWA as the third intern to work on the multigenerational study. Frankie now works as an Assistant Specialist at the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara where she manages field work operations including small craft boating and diving for the Southern California Bight Marine Biodiversity Observation Network (SCB MBON) and Miller Lab. If you haven't seen Frankie in a while...check the kelp!
Benjamin Morrisby (MSc, University of Tasmania, 2015)
The first student primarily supervised by Cornwall. Ben’s project was a met-analysis of the effects of ocean acidification on seaweed.