Maria studies how environmental and social factors affect how fish move.

In her first project she studied how temperature affects the ability of a school of fish to respond to a predator. She used lab experiments, videos of fish swimming, and computer vision software to track the fish. She found that how temperature affects their swimming speed and acceleration depends on whether they are trying to escape from a predator or not.

In her next project she studied social behavior of juvenile salmon. She used state space models to study whether juvenile wild salmon are influenced by the large number of hatchery salmon migrating downstream.

In her last project, she studied various environmental factors and the number of hatchery fish that have been released affects the overall migration timing of wild juvenile salmon in four rivers in Washington state.

Maria has a Master’s degree in physics and is arguably the only PhD student at this point whose research really fits the themes of the lab so we cherish her for that.

I asked Maria what her hobbies and fun facts were for this bio and told her to just tell me what she was thinking, that I wouldn’t copy and paste it into the website. Here’s what she said:

Okay hobbies - snorkeling and surfing (but only if water is warmer than 20C), hiking, traveling, cooking (because I like eating)

and:

fun fact - I have been moving north all my life. I started at latitude 10. Now I’m at 47. Maybe at climate velocity

Which means Maria might be moving at the exact speed to remain static in climate space under climate change. Neat!

If we had an award for most likely to be down to get lunch on little notice, Maria would win that award. Maria if you’re reading this, want to go to Araya’s Place with me and Ben?

Here are links to Maria’s Google scholar and Github.

Maria is now a postdoc with Mark Lewis at the University of Victoria.