Search
Department of Invertebrate Zoology
People
Andrea Quattrini
Research Zoologist
Andrea is a Research Zoologist and Curator of Anthozoa in the Department of Invertebrate Zoology. She studies the ecology and evolution of corals and associated communities, and often focuses her questions on those that live in the most poorly studied environment on earth—the deep sea. Andrea strives to work on projects that directly connect with resource managers in order to help effectively conserve vulnerable marine ecosystems in the face of global ocean change. Andrea has sailed on numerous research vessels throughout the North Atlantic Ocean using submersibles and ROVS and is passionate about education and outreach. In 2020, she was a Fulbright Scholar in Colombia.
Jeremy Horowitz
Postdoctoral Fellow
Jeremy is a postdoctoral fellow that is supervised by Andrea Quattrini at the NMNH. Jeremy studies black corals (Anthozoa: Antipatharia) that occur from just below the sea surface to the deep sea. Jeremy uses an integrated genomic and morphological approach through emerging technologies like targeted capture and 3D imaging to revise the taxonomy and better understand the evolutionary history of black corals. Jeremy enjoys exploring remote habitats to discover and describe new-to-science species.
Camille Leal
Postdoctoral Researcher
Camille is a Postdoctoral Researcher working for the Mesophotic and Deep Benthic Communities project. She specializes in sponge evolution with a focus on the taxonomy, genomics, and metagenomics of these organisms. She is using nuclear and mitochondrial genomes to identify and classify the biodiversity of the phylum Porifera in the Gulf of Mexico and using metagenomic and transcriptomics to analyze the impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on the sponges and their associated organisms.
Tara C McIver
Marine Ecologist Contractor
Tara is a Marine Ecologist that has been working in the deep sea environment since 2000. She has been on several research vessels in the southeast Atlantic using submersibles and ROVs to identify benthic communities. She is currently working on video analysis of deep sea communities from submersible and ROV dives in the North Atlantic Ocean.
Declan Morrissey
Postdoctoral Researcher
Declan is a postdoctoral researcher in the Mesophotic and Deep Benthic Communities project. Declan is interested in evolution and the drivers of speciation in the deep sea. However, to research this topic, accurate species identifications are needed, so he focuses on using both genomic techniques and taxonomy to describe and accurately delimit species. In particular, he has been focusing on the bamboo corals (Octocorallia: Scleralcyonacea: Keratoisididae), a prolific and taxonomically challenging group of globally distributed animals.
Claudia Vaga
Postdoctoral Researcher
Claudia is a Postdoctoral researcher that is supervised by Andrea Quattrini in the Department of Invertebrate Zoology. She has a broad interest in cnidarians species, and she especially focuses on taxonomy and evolution of azooxanthellate and deep-sea stony corals (Anthozoa, Scleractinia). In particular, she is applying integrative approaches that couples genomics techniques and morphological observations to study the diversity and biogeography of corals – and their associates – in the Gulf of Mexico for the Mesophotic and Deep Benthic Communities project.
Eloisa Maria Dadalt
Research Fellow
Eloisa Dadalt is a visiting fellow researcher at Coral Lab, supervised by Andrea Quattrini. She is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Zoology at the University of São Paulo (Brazil). Her research focuses on Agaricia, a stony coral genus from the Western Atlantic Ocean. By integrating molecular and morphological data, she seeks to clarify evolutionary relationships within the group and to improve knowledge of symbiotic interactions, the role of zooxanthellae and bacterial communities in shaping coral ecology and resilience. At the NMNH, Eloisa is conducting a comprehensive morphological assessment of the genus based on the institution’s extensive collections, while expanding her work to the Caribbean Sea by investigating microbiome variation and large-scale host–symbiont associations across the Caribbean and Brazilian provinces.
Samantha Kratman
Intern
Sam is an intern supervised by Dr. Andrea Quattrini. She is working on developing the use of ultra-conserved elements in Symbiodiniaceae, dinoflagellates that form symbiotic associations with many marine invertebrates - most notably reef-building corals. She is also working on the Mesophotic and Deep Benthic Communities project, assisting in subsampling from various locations
Nayeli Garcia
Intern
Nayeli is a research intern focused on techniques for integrative systematics. She combines phylogenomic, geographic, bathymetric, and morphometric datasets to investigate species boundaries and evolutionary relationships. With collaboration from Smithsonian researchers, she will expand her understanding of bioinformatic analysis and morphometry with Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). The main goal of these skills is to utilize the collections that are housed at the Smithsonian and loaned from other museums for phylogenetic reconstruction and morphometric analyses to revise the species description of Scleracis guadalupensis and identify potential new species.