Rich Karp
Ph.D. Candidate
Marine Biology & Ecology
Rich is from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and received his BS in Chemistry from Penn State University in 2014. He then served as a team leader in the AmeriCorps St. Louis Emergency Response Team from 2014 to 2016 doing natural disaster response and terrestrial conservation throughout the United States where he earned the Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award for volunteer service. Rich entered the MPS Exploration Science track in 2016 and graduated in December 2017, after working with Dr. Andrew Baker and Dr. Diego Lirman for his internship on genetic differences in thermal tolerance among nursery reared Acropora cervicornis. Rich formally started his PhD in May 2019 and studies how to manipulate thermal tolerance in corals through algal manipulations both in the lab and in the wild, the tradeoffs associated with these changes, and the role of host genetics in thermal tolerance.
