Cancelled - Evenings at Whitney March 12

Due to unforeseen travel challenges due to COVID-19, tonight's Evenings at Whitney will be cancelled and will be rescheduled at a later date. We apologize for the inconvenience. We look forward to seeing you soon!

The next Evenings at Whitney Lecture Series hosted by the University of Florida Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience will be March 12, 2020, at 7 p.m. with the program titled “DEeP THoughts about Speciation on Coral Reefs”. Dr. Michael Hellberg, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at Louisiana State University, will be the speaker. This free lecture will be presented at the UF Whitney Laboratory Lohman Auditorium, 9505 Ocean Shore Boulevard, in St. Augustine. 

Hellberg will share work on a pair of Caribbean sea fans done with his colleague Carlos Prada.  Through a combination of micro-anatomical studies, transplantation experiments, and genetic analyses, their results paint a picture of how adaptive differences between populations living at different depths play a major role in generating the diversity of organisms living on coral reefs.

Hellberg earned his doctorate in zoology from the University of California at Davis in 1993. He engaged in post-doctoral research at Scripps Institution of Oceanography before moving to the Department of Biological Sciences at Louisiana State University in 1996, where he is presently an Associate Professor and Associate Chair for Graduate Studies.  Investigations in his lab focus on how marine populations diverge and form new species.