Cornelia Osborne
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Biology
AndrewCornelia is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Biology at The Pennsylvania State University in the labs of Dr. Iliana Baums and Dr. Zachary Szpiech. She completed her undergraduate education in Biology and Environmental Studies at Grinnell College (Iowa). Prior to joining the Baums and Szpiech labs, she was a research assistant at the University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana) in Dr. Jon Henry's lab, where she studied gene regulatory networks and cell fate during larval development in the marine snail, Crepidula fornicata. At Penn State, Cornelia's interest lies in developing ways restoration scientists may be able to engineer Caribbean reefs to be more thermally tolerant by combining field and genetic analyses. Her current research includes 1) investigating the fertilization dynamics and determinants of egg-sperm compatibility in hermaphroditic broadcasting corals, 2) evaluating the transcriptomic and physiological mechanisms that allow the cross-species hybrid coral, Acropora prolifera, to thrive in extreme environments and 3) creating coral chimeras by fusing two genetically distinct juvenile corals into one, potentially faster growing and more resilient coral colony and assessing their growth and response to heat stress. ORCID 0000-0001-6759-4542
