Current Position

Maryna is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar in the lab of Deirdre Lyons in the Marine Biology Research Division at Scripps Institute of Oceanography, University of California San Diego.

Previously, she worked with 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 under the supervision of 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?

About Maryna

An undergraduate field course at Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre changed my life. Learning about invertebrate biology showed me that what I really wanted to do with my life was to play in a tide pool. That led me to do my M.Sc. at the University of Victoria, where I fell in love with marine invertebrate larvae. After some time teaching English to students of all ages in both Japan and Québec, I realized that I missed science. I did my PhD as part of the Neotropical Environment Option, giving me the opportunity to work with amazing people at both McGill University and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. I studied eco-evo-devo with Ehab Abouheif, and tackled the development of the calyptraeid gastropods with Rachel Collin. I never figured out that it was smarter to go to Panama during winters in Montreal.

After proving that you can do marine biology in the Midwest with Jonathan Henry at UIUC, my next adventure brings me back to the Pacific Ocean, where I will continue to build Crepidula as a research system with Deirdre Lyons at Scripps Institute of Oceanography.