MARINE LIPIDS - Key Persons
I am the lab manager of the Marine Lipids lab. I completed my MSc at Dalhousie in 2007 that focused on bacterial degradation of paralytic shellfish toxins. I have worked in the Marine Lipids lab since 2009 and my lab work largely consists of lipid quality control testing for local industry. Sue says I keep the lab running.
Since starting my PhD in 1994, I have been fascinated by lipids and their diversity of structures. This characteristic makes them particularly useful as biomarkers of organisms and processes in the marine environment, and I'm interested in refining techniques that use fatty acids and their stable carbon isotopes to estimate animal diets. I've recently become very interested in the production of essential fatty acid by marine phytoplankton and have been investigating methods to best assess that. Because of their range of structures, oxidation of lipids gives rise to an enormous array of oxygenated products. A second major focus of my work involves characterizing those lipid products and the development of methods to rapidly and accurately measure them.
I have been working in R&D with marine oils for the last 10 years. I now manage the development of dietary supplements enriched with omega-3 fatty acids, and establish experimental design and stability testing of oil-based nutraceuticals. I also have experience in structure elucidation and quantification with GCMS.
I'm working as a postdoctoral fellow in a collaborative project with the Marine Lipids Lab and the Bedford Institute of Oceanography, which deals with the production and transfer of essential fatty acids in marine food webs. My role in the project is to examine fatty acid transfer at the plant-animal interface, from primary producers to zooplankton. I'm broadly interested in zooplankton ecology, and my previous research has revolved around feeding, diversity, and predator-prey interactions in coastal zooplankton communities.
I am interested in northern food web ecology, specifically factors responsible for regime shifts in marine systems. My current research focuses on essential fatty acid production in phytoplankton and their transfer to higher trophic levels. The ultimate goal of my PhD is to develop a method using remote satellite sensing to quantify this production over a large scale.
My PhD research involves the development of analytical methods to determine lipid oxidation products in edible oils, with a special focus on measuring minor oxidation products such as epoxides and alcohols. I am using a number of instrumental techniques to accomplish this, including 1 H NMR and GCMS.