A nice write up on the research of Santiago Herrera, the society’s membership secretary.
Santiago Herrera, a recent graduate of the MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution joint program, spent his PhD studying humanity’s impact on the deep sea. Growing up in Columbia, Herrera has been passionate about marine biology since he was a child. He has seen the impact that human activity can leave on the world around us, and, through his passion for the ocean, is driven to better understand how incidents of wide-spread pollution and overfishing may also leave a mark on the deep sea…Herrera has helped transform the way that we think of species in the deep sea by integrating new DNA data with existing paleontological, geological, and oceanographical information. He developed a new toolset of DNA markers — pieces of the genome that are used to establish differences between individuals — to unambiguously determine what makes two species different.
DNA markers tell the story of deep sea adaptation | MIT News.
