Gemma Clucas
Postdoctoral Fellow
I’m a salty seabirder at heart and so most of my projects focus on some aspect of seabird biology. During the summer, you’ll find me collecting fecal samples from terns and puffins in the Gulf of Maine to track changes in their diets over time. Seabirds are fantastic fisheries biologists and we can use changes in their diets to monitor changes in forage fish populations. In the winter, I migrate south to Antarctica, like an Arctic tern, where I will be tracking penguins and collecting fecal samples from them to monitor how warming around the Antarctic Peninsula is influencing food availability for the birds. The rest of the year, I’m either in the lab or at my desk analyzing genomic data from various species (not just birds, fish too!) to understand population structure and adaptive genetic differences among populations so that we can conserve them effectively.
Education
PhD, Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of Oxford and University of Southampton, 2017
MRes, Ocean Sciences, University of Southampton, 2012
MA, Natural Sciences, University of Cambridge, 2010