Meet the Team
We are a diverse and friendly lab covering lab, field and AI, and topics from animal movement to fisheries management, ecotoxicology to food web ecology. We collaborate with people all around the world and welcome you to join us for our weekly bake off on campus - Tuesdays at 10am! Or drop us a message if you have a question.






Principal Investigator
​
Dr Anna M. Sturrock
anna.sturrock (at) essex.ac.uk
Dr Sturrock is a Senior Lecturer (Assoc. Prof.) at the University of Essex, UK, and a UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellow after securing a £1.7 million grant to develop new chemical tools to support fisheries ecology and management. She completed her BSc hons at the University of Edinburgh, her MSc at the University of Otago in New Zealand as a Leverhulme Trust Study Abroad Fellow, and her PhD at the University of Southampton and the Centre for the Environmental Fisheries and Aquaculture Science via a FSBI Studentship. From 2012 to 2020 she was a senior researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz, Berkeley and then Davis, leading a number of projects with NOAA, the US Fish and Wildlife Service and CA Department of Fish and Wildlife. Along with an obsession for using natural tags to reconstruct patterns in animal movement and health, she is passionate about science communication (see About tab), translational ecology and mentorship. She has been a guest lecturer at UC Berkeley, UC Davis, Alaska Fairbanks and now teaches on the University of Essex's BS254 Marine Vertebrates module​, runs the Tropical Marine Biology Virtual Field Courses (BS258/BS720) and recently designed a new Translational Ecology module (BS361) to be showcased in 2025/26. In 2020-2024, Sturrock co-led a working group for COST Action CA19107 focused on advancing methods to estimate marine connectivity (Unifying approaches to Marine Connectivity for Improved Resource Management for the Seas: www.sea-unicorn.com), bringing together >150 scientists and stakeholders from >30 countries through training schools, workshops and conferences. She is also an Editor for Fish and Fisheries and a member of the FSBI Council developing their new sustainability programme.
In 2022-23, Sturrock was a winner at the University of Essex’s Research and Impact Awards: “Outstanding Early Career Researcher” and “Research Visibility Champion”. In 2022, Sturrock was made a University of Essex Public Voice Scholar, and since 2020, she has been a keynote speaker at ICES conference Human Impacts on Marine Functional Connectivity in Portugal, the International Otolith Symposium in Chile, NowPAS in France, and the British Ecological Society Movement Ecology Group Symposium in Southampton, and an invited speaker at the World Fisheries Congress in Adelaide, the Marine Directorate of Scotland, Fisheries Management Scotland, Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis at the University of Oslo and the Universities of Oxford, Southampton and Plymouth. In 2014-20, she was frequently invited to speak at water agency and government policy meetings, including the 2016 State Water Resources Control Board public hearing, and has consulted for the Delta Stewardship Council and the Public Policy Institute of California.
​
Previously, she worked as a PADI Divemaster in Nungwi, Zanzibar (2002) and as a scientific diver in Fiordland, New Zealand (2007), as a researcher for the BBC Natural History Unit (2005), and led a coral reef monitoring project in southwest Madagascar (2003). She is also interested in bioacoustics, volunteering on the Humpback whale Acoustic Research Collaboration (HARC) in 2004 with the University of Queensland, Scripps and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institutions, and co-leading an expedition to Borneo to study the great call of the Agile gibbon in the same year. Her spare time is mostly spent wrangling her two children, but she also enjoys playing football, dabbling on the French horn, skiing and hiking.

Research Assistant / Lab manager /
Part time PhD candidate
Joe Dawson
j.dawson (at) essex.ac.uk
Joe has been keeping the lab running since 2022. His primary research interests involve using biomarkers to track fish movement and phenology, and how this data can inform species management. His MSD project at the University of Bangor involved ageing 0-group seabass (Dicentrarchus labrax) in North Wales, which found a mismatch between the fisheries closure period, meant to protect aggregations of spawning adults. He is now applying this on a wider scale to other parts of the UK, Ireland and mainland Europe to see if this trend is consistent across the entire northern stock. He also runs our laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer (LA-ICP-MS), used to analyse element concentrations in otoliths and other hard structures. In 2024 Joe presented his work at the World Fisheries Congress in Seattle USA and published his first paper in the Journal of Fish Biology. In his spare time he is a keen bass angler.

Postdoctoral Researcher
(Senior Research Officer)
Dr Howard Freeman
hf18773 (at) essex.ac.uk
Howard spans multiple labs, starting his postdoctoral position on a Defra-funded FISP project in 2023 (PI: Dr Michelle Taylor). He is primarily an applied ecologist, with a focus on how fish interact with all aspects of their environment, to understand the drivers of individual survival and population level responses, particularly within the context of fisheries recruitment variation and species distribution patterns. He uses a multidisciplinary approach to answer these questions, employing classical field surveys with advanced molecular methods such as metabarcoding and genotyping, as well as predictive modelling. His PhD, supervised by Prof Tom Cameron at the University of Essex, focussed on the drivers of recruitment variation in seabass, investigating the habitat associations and dietary differences of juveniles within estuarine nurseries (Freeman et al., 2024. JFB), settlement mechanisms, and predicting overwinter survival. His research showed that a range of connected habitats are important for juvenile seabass, and not only saltmarshes, where most conservation focus has been. His most recent postdoc position investigated the genetic connectivity of juvenile bass among estuarine nurseries to better understand population and fisheries stock boundaries. Howard also started a tissue collection initiative in 2024 in collaboration with BASS called Supper4Science.

Postdoctoral Researcher
(Senior Research Officer)
Dr Rebekah Boreham
r.boreham (at) essex.ac.uk
Rebekah joined the lab in January 2024. Her background is in ecotoxicology, with particular focus on how pharmaceuticals affect fish in UK waterways. Her PhD project at the University of Exeter used transgenic zebrafish and high throughput imaging to investigate pharmaceutical-induced oxidative stress, and how this is influenced by other environmental stressors such as temperature. She then had a brief role in biomedical research using transgenic zebrafish again, this time investigating neural signalling of the pancreas. Rebekah is now a postdoctoral researcher, developing analytical chemistry techniques to detect environmental contaminants in archival tissues of fish such as eye lenses, otoliths and scales. The hope is that, by quantifying these compounds in sequential tissue layers, we can reconstruct the age of contaminant exposure and link this to stress responses such as skipped spawning events. Ultimately, these tools will help us understand the chemical burden on fish habitats so we can better protect or restore their critical habitats and support fisheries during this period of global change.

Postdoctoral Researcher
(Senior Research Officer)
Dr Alexia Dubuc
alexia.dubuc (at) essex.ac.uk
Alexia's research spans a wide range of topics, including fish physiology, fish ecology, water quality, biogeography, environmental management, and conservation. She is particularly interested in understanding how organisms interact with their habitats and adapt to extreme environmental conditions. Her work focuses on hypoxia, whether it occurs naturally in tropical tidal ecosystems like mangroves or results from human activities such as nutrient enrichment in regions like the Baltic Sea. To address these questions, she employs diverse methodologies, combining field-based observations and data collection with laboratory techniques such as respirometry, haematology, morphological analysis, and the use of natural tags like otoliths. By integrating these methods, she aims to explore broad ecophysiological processes and provide insights that contribute to the conservation and sustainable management of coastal ecosystems. Previously, Alexia did her PhD at James Cook University in Australia, her MSc at the European Institute for Marine Studies, her BSc at the University of Western Brittany and received a University diploma in technology from the University Institute of Caen. Her current postdoc focuses on (a) validating otolith and eye lens tracers of hypoxia via in situ sampling and paired electronic tagging data, and (b) using these tracers to reconstruct lifetime exposure histories and to assess physiological impacts such as legacy effects on growth and fecundity.

Research Assistant
​
Clare Connell
c.connell (at) essex.ac.uk
Clare is a social scientist with a background in communications strategy and a MA in Sustainability and Behaviour Change from the Centre for Alternative Technology. Her project at Essex has focused on activities that create public participation in sea bass science and how we can engage school-age children in 'marine connectivity' and measure the impact of public-engagement with science. Clare and Anna organised the first All About the Bass symposium, held at the University of Essex in July 2024 and co-wrote/designed the resulting report and Bass Information Hub.

Research Assistant
MSD student (former Frontrunner intern)
Felix Astejada
felix.astejada (at) essex.ac.uk
Felix has worked in the lab since 2021, starting as a Frontrunner during his undergrad working on salmon eye lens isotopes. He has since moved onto cephalopods, doing an MSD project part time while stupporting the lab as a Research Assistant. His MSD research focuses on using eye lens and beak carbon and nitrogen isotopes to understand the feeding ecology of common and elegant cuttlefish and the southern shortfin squid in the western English Channel. His first chapter explores tissue-specific differences while his second chapter explores isotopic niche variation between cephalopods and the commerically important brown crab and European lobster.

PhD student. Supervisors: Eoin O'Gorman, Anna Sturrock, Tom Cameron, Rasmus Lauridsen (Six Rivers Foundation), Colin Bull (University of Stirling/Atlantic Salmon Trust). Funder: ARIES .
Peter Betts
peter.betts (at) essex.ac.uk
Peter's primary interests include metabolic rate and how this interacts with external factors such as temperature to influence fish biology and ecology. He also works with stable isotopes, performing studies to understand how these natural tracers can be used to infer an organism's ecology. His master's project investigated spatial changes in field metabolic rate and thermal sensitivity of teleosts across the Barents Sea, using stable isotope analysis of their otoliths. He found metabolism and the techniques used to infer it particularly intriguing and built on these skills as a research assistant at the University of Southampton using stable isotope analysis of Porbeagle and Spurdog eye lenses to infer ontogenic movement patterns. He is now building on and applying these skills investigating the metabolic drivers of growth and survival in salmonids, particularly Atlantic salmon and brown trout.

PhD student. Supervisors: Anna Sturrock, Eoin O'Gorman, Rachel Johnson (NOAA), Nora Hanson (Marine Scotland), Colin Bull (University of Stirling / Atlantic Salmon Trust).
Lucy Smith
lucy.r.smith (at) essex.ac.uk
Lucy is a marine ecologist with a particular interest in fish ecology and movement. She uses natural tags such as otoliths (ear stones), eye lenses and scales combined with statistical models and state-space hidden Markov models to reconstruct the life histories of salmon to better understand their migration and foraging pathways at sea, and the potential carryover effects from freshwater life stages. Her PhD project revolves around four key questions:
-
Is incidence of vaterite switching (a different form of calcium carbonate crystals that lead to deformed otoliths) higher in hatchery vs. wild outmigrating juveniles?
-
Does size at outmigration of Atlantic salmon in the North Atlantic vary among cohorts and populations?
-
For cohort-matched outmigrating post-smolts and returning adults is there a difference in the distribution of size and age at outmigration suggestive of size selective mortality?
-
Do Irish, English and Scottish populations of salmon take different migration pathways at sea?
Lucy presented her initial PhD findings at the 2024 iMarCO Symposium in Montpelier and recently went to Greenland to collect samples for a related UKRI project.

PhD student. Supervisors: Anna Sturrock, Eoin O'Gorman, Matt Newton (Marine Scotland), Colin Bull (University of Stirling / Atlantic Salmon Trust). Funder: University of Essex / KOWL.
Mike Bevins Cameron
michael.bevinscameron (at) essex.ac.uk
Mike graduated from the University of Essex in 2023 with a first-class BSc in Marine Biology after completing a Frontrunner internship in Dr Sturrock's lab that led onto his PhD. Atlantic salmon are important ecologically, economically, and culturally, yet they are in widespread decline, with Scottish populations decreasing by around 40% over the past 40 years. Tagging and trawling studies suggest planned windfarm developments intercept the migratory pathways of emigrating juveniles and returning adults, which may affect homing ability and survival. To assess if particular populations are at greater risk of impact and if adult straying rates change following construction, Mike's PhD aims to develop a multi-marker approach to provenance assignment, using otolith elemental concentrations, eye lens isotope ratios and SNPs, while also testing if non-lethal sampling can be used to assign post-smolts with similar accuracy. Mike presented on his PhD project at the ScotMER Symposium, SFCC Biologists Conference and NoWPAS conference in 2024, and is attending and on the committee for the 2025 NoWPAS meeting in Canada.

PhD student. Supervisors: Ben Ciotti (Uni of Plymouth), Anna Sturrock, Emma Sheehan (UPlym), Ross Griffin (Ocean Ecology Lab), James Stewart (IFCA). Funder: ARIES.
Marion Lefebvre du Prey
marion.lefebvreduprey (at) plymouth.ac.uk
Marion holds a bachelor’s degree in Marine Ecology, and a master’s degree in Ecological Modelling, both completed in France. She loves combining ecological and modelling skills, to better understand and predict species and their environment, as well as how climate change impacts them. She is focused on Coastal Ecology, and young fishes’ habitats. During my masters’ thesis, and a subsequent year-long role as a research assistant at INRAE (French Research Institute for the Agriculture and Environment), she studied the quality of juvenile flatfishes’ habitats. She used individual-based energetic models to assess the issue of trophic limitation in coastal and estuarine nurseries. Her PhD focuses on juvenile sole in the Severn Estuary and developing functional indices of growth and habitat quality. She is also involved in the ICES working group on the Value of Coastal habitats for Exploited Populations and presented her PhD work at the iMarCO Symposium in Montpelier in 2024.

MSD student. Supervisors: Anna Sturrock, Rosie Williams (ZSL), Boyd McKew.
Katerina Schiffnederova
katerina.schiffnederova (at) essex.ac.uk
After joining Dr Sturrock’s lab as a Frontrunner intern in 2022, Katerina is now working on her MSD focused on spatiotemporal patterns in unintentionally produced PCBs in harbour porpoises. Her project aims to analyse PCB levels in porpoise blubber, with a particular emphasis on the rates of decline across regions in the UK and the differences between intentionally and unintentionally produced PCB congeners. This research is conducted in collaboration with Dr Rosie Williams at ZSL, utilizing data from the Marine Mammal Stranding Database. Katerina completed her undergraduate degree in marine biology at the University of Essex, where her research in Dr Sturrock’s lab focused on sea bass nursery habitats in southern England. She then earned a taught master's degree at the University of St Andrews, with her thesis exploring the habitat preferences of Indus River dolphins during the dry season using binomial and Poisson Generalized Linear Models.

Postdoctoral Fellow
Juan Miguel Miró
jmmiro (at) us.es
Juanmi is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Seville (Spain) and recently completed a 12-month position as an international fellow in Dr Sturrock's lab. During his stay, he focused on using otolith element concentrations to predict estuary contribution rates and lifetime estuary usage by the European anchovy in the Gulf of Cadiz, one of Spain's most commercially valuable species. His broader research interests include the study of biological communities in estuaries, with an emphasis on larvae and juvenile fish populations. He has extensive experience analyzing environmental and biological factors to evaluate the nursery function of highly productive ecosystems. Additionally, his work addresses the impacts of anthropogenic activities, such as dredging, water pollution, and wastewater discharges, offering practical insights for the sustainable management of these ecosystems.
Past lab members
[University of Essex]
Heather Elder (MSc 2023-2024)
Aaron Burke (BSc 2023-24)
Alice Martin (BSc 2023-24)
Caragh Fletcher (BSc 2023-24)
Amy Webber (Frontrunner 2023)
Hannah Rushton (Frontrunner 2023)
Lorna McKellar (MSc student 2021-22)
Lauren Bell (BSc 2021-22)
Joaquin Diaz Sanchez (BSc 2021-22)
Mike Bevins Cameron (Frontrunner 2022)
Ashmitha Jayachandran Mishma (Frontrunner 2022)
Katerina Schiffnederova (Frontrunner 2022)
Luke Harrison (MSc student 2020-21)
Lucy Smith (BSc 2020-21)
Nicole Grierson (BSc 2020-21)
Sophie Gibson (BSc 2020-21)
[University of California, Davis]
Mollie Ogaz (Junior Specialist 2019-20)
Sage Lee (Junior Specialist 2019-20)
Laura Coleman (Junior Specialist 2018-20)
Sierra Schluep (Student Assistant 2018-19)
Bradyn O'Connor (Student Assistant 2018-19)
Amanda Gonzales (Student Assistant 2019)
Keiko Mertz (Junior Specialist 2017-19)
Pedro Morais (Postdoctoral fellow 2017-19)
Kelly Neal (Student Assistant and Junior Specialist 2016-20)
Dana Myers (Student Assistant 2016-18)
Krista Schmidt (Student Assistant 2016-19)
George Whitman (JJ Lab Manager 2015-)


