Alison joined the Marine Genomics Lab in August 2021. Her research interests include using genetics to understand population dynamics and aid in conservation efforts. She is especially interested in how these dynamics are changing in the ocean due to climate change and other environmental stressors.  Currently, she will be using next generation sequencing methods and close-kin mark recapture analyses to estimate the population size of Atlantic Red Snapper.  

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Alison received her BS from the University of North Carolina Wilmington in 2014, her MSc from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia in 2015, and PhD at the KAUST in 2020. Her dissertation focused on using molecular tools such as RNA-seq to evaluate the effects of climate change on coral reef associated fish. This included adapting a novel proteomics method for use in non-model organisms to identify ecologically relevant changes at a proteome level scale. She also has a background in coral reef ecology and helped document, for the first time, a mass coral bleaching event in the Red Sea.