Biography

I am currently a PhD candidate at the School of Earth Sciences, University of Western Australia. My research interests are coral reefs biology and ecology as well as coral reefs conservation and management. I am passionate about working on unique and less well-studied reef systems where I feel my research can make the greatest contribution to improving our understanding of reef response and resilience to climate change and anthropogenic impacts.

Prior to my arrival to UWA I worked as a research assistant in Prof. Oren Levy's laboratory for molecular marine ecology and in Prof. Yair Achituv's laboratory for ecological and behavioural mechanisms of invertebrates, Department of Natural Sciences, Bar-Ilan University, Israel. I was involved in a wide variety of research projects including (1) genetics of coral populations, (2) coral reef palaeoecology, (3) circadian clocks in corals and sea anemones and (4) the phylogenetics of corals and barnacles.

I hold a master degree from the Marine Technologies Department and the Marine Biology Department at The Leon H. Charney School of Marine Sciences, University of Haifa, Israel. My thesis topic was "Analyzing the distribution of coral recruits using fluorescence imaging". In this project, I designed the use of a fluorescence camera specifically for coral recruits daytime surveys.