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Dr. James A. Coyer It was Malle and Cousteau's The Silent World, viewed in a dusty meeting hall on a wintry day in Wisconsin that forged my dream and commitment to become a marine biologist. Never mind that I was only 8 at the time and that it would be another 13 years before I finally felt the spray of an ocean on my face. At the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, I majored in biology and learned to scuba dive between my junior and senior year. A year after receiving my B.S. degree, I entered the Ph.D. program at the University of Southern California. Although the campus is in central Los Angeles, I spent nearly all of my graduate years at USC's marine lab on offshore Santa Catalina Island. Suffice it to say that diving in a southern California kelp forest is a bit different from diving in a Wisconsin lake. Kelp forests motivated my dissertation and continue to be a source of personal and professional inspiration. After graduating from USC, I taught for five years at Marymount College near Los Angeles. During this time, I became interested in using molecular techniques to address ecological and evolutionary questions in kelps and other large seaweeds. I left Marymount for a three-year NIH Fellowship in microbiology at SUNY-Stony Brook, which immersed me into another fascinating world, namely the thought processes and bench work of molecular biology. My graduate training in kelp forest ecology and my fellowship training in molecular biology finally merged when I left Stony Brook to accept a research position with Dr. Randy Alberte at UCLA. Again, I avoided the Los Angeles campus and spent the entire time at the Hopkins Marine Station in central California, where I worked on nitrogen-fixing marine bacteria and population biology of giant kelp. Two years ago, I accepted a three-year research position with Drs. Jeanine Olsen and Wytze Stam at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. The European Union-sponsored research uses microsatellite analysis to study population genetics of an intertidal seaweed (Fucus serratus) and is one of only a handful of studies worldwide to use microsatellite analysis on seaweeds. Although most of my research focuses on population genetics of seaweeds, I am actively involved in several other areas. Six years ago, I began a collaboration with Dr. Celia Smith and others from the University of Hawaii to investigate the biology and ecophysiology of the tropical seaweed, Halimeda spp, on Florida reefs. Our association continues with the current saturation mission in Aquarius, which is my fourth overall (Hydrolab, 1983; Aquarius, 1994, 1998). Additionally, I continue to work with California colleagues to determine the ecological role of sea urchins in California kelp forests and am concluding collaborations investigating: the world-wide biogeography of giant kelp, the effect of introduced species on kelp abundance in New England kelp forests, and genetic variability in cultures of diatoms. I've also taught Underwater Research at the Shoals Marine Laboratory in the Gulf of Maine each summer for the past 20 years. The following publications highlight some of my recent interests.
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