Current Position
Maryna is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the lab of Jonathan Henry in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She holds a PhD in Biology, Neotropical Environment Option, from the Department of Biology, McGill University, Montréal, Canada and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama. She was supervised by Ehab Abouheif (McGill) and Rachel Collin (STRI).

Research Interests
How do you get from a single cell to a complex multicellular organism? Why do marine invertebrates have so many ways of doing just that? What role does the environment play in development? How does development change over evolutionary time? How do transitions between different types of development happen? What do invertebrate larvae do while they are swimming around in the ocean? How do organisms use so many of the same developmental “tools” to make so many different forms?