Welcome to the Stillman Lab
Our laboratory is located at the Romberg Tib
uron Center for Environmental Studies, the marine research laboratory of San Francisco State University. In the broadest sense, our research focuses on understanding the ultimate and proximate causes of physiological diversity in relation to the physical environment, and understanding the ecological consequences of physiological response limits in the context of climate change.
We study a broad diversity of marine organisms, including porcelain crabs, corals, coccolithophores, and clams. Our research blends in vivo physiology, such as cardiac activity or metabolic rate, with protein biochemistry, including enzymology and protein structure-function relationships, and we use 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 acc
limation, 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.