The Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience
Please welcome Dr. Federica Scucchia to the Whitney Laboratory! She recently joined the Martindale Lab as a Postdoctoral Research Associate.
Federica received her B.S. in Biological Sciences from the University of Bologna, Italy, where she first started working on the ecology of deep-water corals. She then pursued her Master’s under a joint program between the University of Bologna and the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), where she focused on coral biology and gene expression. While at UCSB, Federica obtained the AAUS Scientific Diving certification, which allowed her to dive for her research on corals during her Ph.D. at the Inter-University Institute for Marine Sciences in Eilat, Israel. Here, she focused on the influence of environmental factors on the physiology, morphology, and gene expression of stony corals across life stages.
Federica joins the Martindale Lab as a postdoctoral research associate. Her main research will be focused on utilizing the starlet sea anemone Nematostella vectensis as a universal expression platform to investigate various aspects of the evolution of biomineralization for environmental restoration purposes (e.g. coral reef enhancement). She will use a variety of techniques including molecular biology, protein engineering, and high-resolution in vitro and vivo characterization of biomaterial properties.
Aside from doing science, Federica has many interests including being outdoor in nature, doing sports, scuba diving, and traveling. Find out more about her here.