Wesley Sparagon

Position

PhD Candidate

Biography 

My interest in marine ecosystems started very early as a kid growing up in San Francisco, California. Some of my earliest memories are of boogie boarding and tide pooling around the beautiful Northern California coast and my passion for marine ecosystems has stayed with me ever since. However, I decided to try out the landlocked experience for college and attended Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, where I received my B.A. in Biology in 2015. For my senior thesis I had the pleasure of working with Dr. Sara Belchik-Moser as well as Dr. Vance Vredenburg and Dr. Andy Zink (San Francisco State University) investigating the amphibian skin microbiome and its relationship to amphibian skin disease. This experience sold me on the academic research path and opened my mind up to the incredible field of microbial ecology. Our invisible bacterial, archaeal, (and yes even eukaryotic) friends live in every possible niche, have astounding metabolic diversity, and are the key shapers of our environment and mediators of our interactions within any ecosystem. Since this realization I have been utterly unable to let go of the field of microbial ecology.

After spending 2 years as a field technician for various amphibian, fish, and avian monitoring projects in the United States and Solomon Islands, I decided it was time to go back to school. I am now pursuing a PhD in Marine Biology at UH Mānoa in the lab of Dr. Craig Nelson. My research focuses the interaction between benthic organisms on coral reefs and bacterial communities in the surrounding sea water, how these interactions are altered by climate change, and how this in turn changes the coral reef ecosystem.When I’m not in the lab you can usually find me surfing, birding, doing darkroom photography, or most importantly, sleeping.