Ashley Smart

I spent most of my life fearful of the unknown vastness that is the oceans; today, that unknowingness is the driving force behind my pursuit to study how human-driven climate change impacts our oceans. Broadly, my research addresses the following questions: (1) Current-day and future impacts of climate change in marine ecosystems, (2) Response of organisms to individual stressors and multiple stressors, (3) Deriving a mechanistic understanding of the impacts of stressors across multiple scales in an individual organism, (4) Scaling up from individual to ecosystem. Currently, I am using the model organism Aplysia californica to explore the relationship between behavior and neurophysiology under ocean acidification.