Current Lab Members
Ileana Fenwick, PhD student
I am a PhD student in the Marine Science Program at UNC-Chapel Hill. I received my B.S. in Marine and Environmental Science from Hampton University in 2020 and am a Bowie, MD native. My primary research focus is to understand how valuable marine fisheries and the interactions within them are shifting in response to climate change. I hope to use my passions for ecology, quantitative fisheries, and policy to further inform effective management strategies for our oceans.
Sally Dowd, PhD student
Growing up near the coast in North Carolina, I gained immense respect for and interest in the marine environment. I graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a B.S. in Biology. As a current Ph.D. student, I leverage advanced quantitative methodology and unconventional data sources to estimate the abundance and distribution of estuarine and marine predators and their prey. In addition to my research, I am passionate about communicating science through outreach activities and photography. See Sally’s Google Scholar site and personal website for more details.
Jade Hong, PhD student
Raised in a small city in South Korea right by the East Sea for over 20 years, I always had a close relationship with the sea. As I pursued the natural science of ecology, zoology, and evolutionary biology during my undergraduate studies at Boston University, where I received my B.A., I naturally built my academic passion for the coexistence of human and marine life. Currently, I am a Ph.D. student at the Department of Earth, Marine, and Environmental Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Above all, my study focuses on how to effectively use (physical, chemical, and biological) oceanographic data in both reproducible and collaborative science to forecast the direction that human impact might take us all: the body of water, the creatures that live in it, and the people whose lives depend on it.
Sarah Weisberg, PhD student (SBU)
Sarah Weisberg is a PhD student in the Nye Lab, studying climate change impacts and resilience in marine food webs. She is currently using the Ecopath with Ecosim modeling framework to explore past and possible future emergent changes in the Gulf of Maine food web, with a focus on understanding the relationship between predatory fish assemblages and food web resilience. Sarah is co-founder of the NYC-based non-profit BioBus, a science outreach organization which has reached over 350,000 students since 2008. She has served as Chair of the Mobile Laboratory Coalition and as co-founder of SOWING: a network for science outreach. Prior to launching BioBus, Sarah completed a BA at Harvard College and an MSc in Cell Biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science. She is passionate about building inclusive science communities and using scientific research to advance equity. Sarah’s Google Scholar Site
Dylan Sinnickson, Postdoctoral scholar (SBU)
Dylan Sinnickson is a senior postdoctoral associate in the Nye lab studying the body condition and food web ecology of humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) in the New York Bight. His academic career began at Middlebury College, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in conservation biology. He later received his master’s in fisheries management and conservation at the University of Miami, where he investigated trends in eutrophication and fish population densities in estuaries throughout the Gulf of Mexico. Dylan received his PhD from the University of Florida in fisheries and aquatic sciences, where his research focused on assessing responses of estuarine fish populations to changes in freshwater inputs within the Suwannee River Estuary. Much of his research has employed the use of quantitative models to assess broad-scale ecological changes in aquatic systems. Dylan’s Google scholar site