Emily Yeager
Ph.D. Student
Marine Biology & Ecology
Emily is interested in investigating the dynamics of the relationship between scleractianian corals and their symbiotic algae and understanding how that relationship changes in shifting marine environments, under anthropogenic stress, and in the face of climate change. Evaluating the mechanisms of this symbiosis under ambient and stressful environmental conditions will help enhance current knowledge of how corals acquire and shift symbiont communities on the reef. Emily’s research focuses on utilizing symbiont expulsion and uptake as a metric to assess coral health and to advance ongoing research on coral-algal symbiosis in the Coral Reef Futures Lab.
Prior to joining the University of Miami, Emily graduated from Wellesley College in 2020 with a B.A. in Biology and a minor in Environmental Studies. As an undergraduate, she studied the marine cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus and examined the role of extracellular vesicles in marine microbial trophic interactions under the guidance of Dr. Steven Biller. Emily also assessed the influence of acute light shocks on vesicle production in Dr. Penny Chisholm’s lab at MIT, advanced a decade long research initiative to document migratory and seasonal species with the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and worked as a data analyst to examine and map spatiotemporal plankton monitoring data from Lake Baikal.
