Research fellow: Danielle Jordan
Hometown: Cumberland, RI
School: University of Rhode Island
Major: Marine Biology

A rising senior in the College of the Environment and Life Sciences (CELS), Danielle Jordan confidently works her way around the tanks in the Blount aquaculture lab at the URI Graduate School of Oceanography.

She empties the tanks of water and rinses them out as she explains her Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) work with CELS postdoctoral researcher Tal Ben-Horin — a project that seeks to understand how disease defense strategies influence the productivity of farm-raised oysters.

Dermo disease is a fatal condition caused by a naturally-occurring pathogen and poses the greatest impact along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Hatcheries and selective breeding programs have placed a high priority on selectively bred oyster lines that perform well. The SURF project, which aligns with the RI NSF EPSCoR mission of understanding the response of marine organisms to a changing ocean, aims to identify disease defense traits to target for selective breeding.

“We’re injecting the oysters with varying concentrations of Dermo and examining the best concentration to properly analyze resistance,” says Jordan. “After a period of time, we’ll use quantitative PCR (a molecular biology technique) to determine the amount of Dermo left within the tissue of each oyster, which can help us measure resistance and tolerance.”

Jordan, who knew she wanted to be a marine biologist since she was two years old, when her father took her to an aquarium, says the hands-on work of the SURF experience is exactly what she wants to be doing.

“SURF offered a new opportunity to frame my own research experience.”

She spent two years on a project with URI Professor Jacqueline Webb, researching lateral line morphology of deep sea fish or studying how certain deep sea fish evolved a system of bony sensory canals used to detect movement in the water around them. All fish possess a lateral line system, Jordan notes, but the extreme environment of the deep sea presents certain challenges that cause these canals to evolve in unique ways within these fish.

Jordan also spent a summer working conducting observational research of whales in Stellwagen Bank, off the coast of Massachusetts, and a semester in the URI Bermuda Program, which provides an immersion into the study of marine sciences at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Science (BIOS), working with coral.

“SURF offered a new opportunity to frame my own research experience,” says Jordan. “I knew I wanted to work with a mentor and get more hands-on experience.”

After graduation in the spring, Jordan says she plans to take a gap year and pursue a longer term internship to gain more experience before setting her sights on graduate school.

Story and photo by Amy Dunkle