Personnel

Grieg Steward, Ph.D. ~ Principal Investigator

My research focus is on the microbial ecology of aquatic systems with emphases on the diversity of viruses in the environment and their contributions to the ecology and evolution of eukaryotic and prokaryotic microorganisms and the ecology of human pathogenic vibrios in coastal waters.

Contact: grieg@hawaii.edu

Online CV

Department Profile

Julie Thomy, Ph.D. ~ Post-doctoral Researcher (co-mentored with Kyle Edwards)

 Julie earned her doctoral degree from the Sorbonne University in France. Her dissertation research focused on the interactions between the marine picoalga Ostreococcus tauri and its giant viruses (genus Prasinovirus). In her current position Julie is working on projects to characterize novel marine viruses and investigate the ecological constraints that influence virus size distributions in the ocean.

Christopher Schvarcz, Ph.D. ~ Research Affiliate

Dr. Schvarcz earned B.S. and M.S. degrees in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Arizona, Tucson and a Ph.D. in Oceanography from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His research focuses on the cultivation and characterization of marine eukaryotic phytoplankton and mixotrophs and the ecology and genomic diversity of viruses that infect them.

Andrian (Adi) Gajigan, M.Sc. ~ Graduate Student

Adi completed his B.Sc. in Biochemistry and M.Sc in Marine Science at the University of the Philippines Manila and Diliman campus, respectively. Previously, he contributed to the development of an early predictive system for harmful algal blooms. He also applied -omics approaches to investigate the thermal resilience of corals and the diversity of marine microbes in the Philippine archipelago. Currently, he is working on phytoplankton viruses. You can visit his website for more information.

Petra Byl, B.Sc. ~ Graduate Student (co-advised by Kyle Edwards)

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). Petra joined the Steward lab as an NSF graduate research fellow in biological oceanography in the fall of 2018.  Currently, she aims to understand how viruses influence nutrient and micronutrient cycles in the open ocean.

Lab Alumni

Graduate Student Researchers & Postdocs

Research Assistants

Undergraduate researchers

High school interns