People

Alexia is a new PhD student at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at JCU. She recently moved to Townsville after living for 9 months on Lizard Island working as a camera assistant for the BBC. She is from a cold, landlocked city in central Canada, and completed her Bachelor of Science at the University of Winnipeg in 2010. She moved to Australia in 2011 to complete her Bachelor of Marine Science and Management with Honours at the National Marine Science Centre with Southern Cross University where she investigated the effects of climate change on seaweed physiology, defence, and seaweed-amphipod interactions. Upon completing honours, she took a year off and moved to Vancouver to work in public programming at the Vancouver Aquarium in 2012. In 2013 she made the leap across the Pacific once again for sun, sand, and science. She then worked for two years as a research assistant back at the National Marine Science Centre assisting and conducting mainly climate change and Crown-of-Thorns Starfish (COTS) research. She is currently studying the effect of increasing temperature on marine plant-herbivore (seaweed-fish) interactions under the supervision of Dr. Andrew Hoey and Prof. Morgan Pratchett. Specifically, as the oceans warm, how consumption by herbivores will scale with growth/primary production by primary producers.