Philip Fan Yang

Biography

Hello there. My name is Philip Yang (he/him) and I am a student in the Davies Lab at the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography. I graduated with a BS in Biology from Villanova University in 2021. During my time there, I worked with Dr. Samantha Chapman and Dr. Adam Langley in the ‘Changley’ Lab on the WETFEET Project. In 2022, I was awarded a Fulbright grant to the Philippines to study local fisheries sustainability with USAID Fish Right. I was able to travel there after many COVID-19 delays, and spent a wonderful summer working and learning there. Check out this StoryMap I made for my time there. This Fall (2022) I will start with a focus on deep-sea corals in the Gulf of Mexico as part of the Deepwater Horizon restoration efforts, and see where the journey takes me. I am interested in understanding spatial-temporal scales of a potential food source to deep- and meso- coral reefs in the form of daily zooplankton migration. If you’d like to learn more about me, this StoryMap serves as my personal CV of sorts (can you tell I love StoryMaps?). 

Research

– Spatiotemporal ecology
– Mesophotic coral reefs
– Environmental drivers of reef distribution
– Benthic lander in situ observational systems
– Species distribution models

Education

B.S. Biology, Villanova University

Selected Publications

Yang, P.F., Spanier, N., Aldredge, P., Shahid, N., Coleman, A., Lyons, J., Langley, J.A., 2023. Will free-living microbial community composition drive biogeochemical responses to global change? Biogeochemistry 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10533-023-01015-0