Iliana Baums, Ph.D.
Professor
Marine Conservation
Dr. Baums studies how corals adapt to a changing climate and environmental stress using molecular tools. Corals are sensitive to very small increases in seawater temperature and there is concern that with global warming most corals will be lost in the next few hundred years. Baums has co-authored >80 articles in peer-reviewed journals and has delivered presentations on her research around the world. Baums served on the scientific advisory board of SECORE, the Sexual Coral Reproduction Foundation, a conservation initiative based in Wiesbaden, Germany and chairs the working groups on coral conservation genetics of the Coral Conservation Consortium. She also serves on the editorial boards of the journals Frontiers in Microbiology, Frontiers in Marine Science and the Proceedings of the Royal Society Series B. Baums in 2020 was awarded the Faculty Scholars Medal for Outstanding Achievements from the Pennsylvania State University. In 2014, she received a Humboldt Fellowship and was chosen as a fellow for the Hanse-Wissenschafts-Kolleg. She received the 2004 Smith Prize, awarded for the most original piece of research at the Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science at the University of Miami. She now leads the marine conservation group at HIFMB. Prior to joining HIFMB, she was a professor of biology at Penn State from August 2006. Baums was an assistant researcher to Dr. Rob Toonen at the University of Hawaii since 2005. Prior to that, she was a postdoctoral researcher to Dr. Jack Fell at the University of Miami from 2004 to 2005. She earned her doctorate degree at the University of Miami in 2003 and her Diplom in marine biology from the University of Bremen in Germany in 2000.
