Current Lab Members

Kyle Edwards

Kyle is an Associate Professor in the Department of Oceanography at UH Mānoa. He is an ecologist with a background in plankton and benthic systems. His research currently focuses on phytoplankton and viruses that infect them, and aims to integrate ecological theory with empirical processes using a combination of experiments, models, and statistical analysis. Kyle received his Ph.D. in 2010 from UC Davis, advised by Jay Stachowicz. For several years he was a postdoc at Kellogg Biological Station, with Elena Litchman and Chris Klausmeier. Kyle received a Simons Foundation Early Career Investigator Award in Marine Microbial Ecology and Evolution.

Kyle teaches a graduate level statistics course, "Advanced Statistics in R" (OCN 683). He also co-teaches a required course in the Oceanography graduate program, Microplankton Ecology (OCN 626).

Anamica Bedi de Silva

Anamica is a graduate student in the Department of Oceanography. She earned her Bachelor's degree in biology from New College of Florida, where she completed her undergraduate thesis project on cyanobacteria population dynamics. She aims to predict changes in marine phytoplankton communities as anthropogenic climate change progresses. Anamica has done field research on tropical forest ecology with The Poulsen Lab at Duke University and Rosildo Santos Paiva at the Federal University of Para in Brazil.

Petra Byl

Petra graduated from the University of Chicago with a B.Sc. in Geophysics. As an undergraduate researcher she studied the impact of redox gradients on the structure of aquatic microbial communities (Marine Biological Laboratory, MA; Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, Bermuda) and viral ecology in freshwater lakes (University of Chicago, IL). In the fall of 2018, Petra began her graduate studies as an NSF graduate research fellow in Biological Oceanography, co-advised by Grieg Steward and Kyle Edwards. Her work focuses on giant viruses in the North Pacific Subtropical gyre.

Kelsey McBeain

Kelsey is interested in the ecology of the oceans, including ecological interactions, food web dynamics, and nutrient cycling from the microbial to the macroscopic. Her experiences lie in symbiosis of bobtail squid and their bioluminescent bacterial symbiont, host-virus interactions of marine bacteria, predator-prey dynamics between phytoplankton and microzooplankton, and the effects of marine archaea and bacteria on the nitrogen cycle at various institutions. Here at UHM she is moving into trait dynamics that dictate distribution of mixotrophic phytoplankton and viral-host interactions of phytoplankton.

Former Lab Members

Laetitia Dadaglio

postdoc 2019-2021

Colleen Hayward

undergraduate researcher 2019-2020

Courtney Morgan

undergraduate researcher 2019

Alaina Smith

undergraduate researcher 2015-2017