Dr. Stacy Krueger-Hadfield, assistant professor in the Department of Biology, along with her Israeli colleague Dr. Gil Rilov, secured a $60,000 Binational Science Foundation Start-Up Grant that will investigate the response to temperature and ocean acidification in the Levantine region of the Mediterranean Sea. This is one of the fastest warming regions in the world, but in terms of evolutionary ecology, is poorly understood despite being heavily impacted for thousands of years by human behavior, such as over-fishing. With the support of the two-year grant, Krueger-Hadfield and Rilov will use one native and one non-native seaweed to contrast response to these abiotic stressors associated with climate change. They will follow up with work on differences in mating system dynamics that might help them forecast how these population will respond to climate change. UAB alumna Kathryn Schoenrock will also collaborate on this project with Drs. Krueger-Hadfield and Rilov during this project.

In addition, Dr. Krueger-Hadfield was part of an international team that was awarded an Agence Nationale de la Recherche Appel à Projets Générique (French National Research Agency General Projects; 437.707,80€) called Clonix2D that will use algal, cnidarian, pathogen, plant, and aphid models to expand the tools available for population genetics in organisms that are partially clonal (i.e., they undergo both sexual and asexual reproduction. The consortium will build on a previous iteration, Clonix, that released many new analytical tools for population genetics. Dr. Krueger-Hadfield will co-coordinate one of the working groups on the dissemination of results and outreach while also contributing data sets for testing new population genetic tools.