Welcome to the Stillman Lab

We study marine environmental physiology in order to better understand the ecological consequences of physiological response limits in the context of climate change, and to elucidate basic physiological mechanisms. Many of our projects focus on global warming, thermal stress, and ocean acidification.

We research a broad diversity of marine organisms, including porcelain crabs, corals, coccolithophores, and clams. Research approaches used include in vivo physiology, protein biochemistry, and functional genomics, specifically transcriptome profiling using cDNA microarrays, to elucidate the mechanistic bases for physiological plasticity and diversity.

Projects currently underway in our laboratory involve an examination of correlated changes in thermal phenotype and gene expression during thermal acclimation, acclimatization, and stress responses in porcelain crabs, functional genomics of porcelain crabs including construction of our microarray and sequence database PCAD, thermal biology of corals that survive extreme conditions in a Samoan lagoon, metabolic responses to environmental salinity change in an invasive clam in San Francisco Bay, and physiological and genomic responses of unicellular calcifying algae called coccolithophores to ocean acidification predicted by year 2100. Please explore this website to learn more about our research interests and the interesting, talented, and fun-loving people involved (click here for more images).