"Where does the light in the ocean come from?"

A surprisingly large amount of marine animals produce light for various reasons, including camouflage as well as revealing themselves or others. My research focuses on the biochemistry of light production of the parchment tube worm Chaetopterus sp. and on optical properties of the nudibranch Flabellina (Spanish Shawl), the sea slug Navanax, and the blue Traveller's palm seed. In the mucus secreted by Chaetopterus, we found a super fast ferritin that we are now further characterizing.

I obtained my Masters degree in Biochemistry and my PhD in Bio-engineering at the University of Leuven (Belgium), where I first studied a proposed inhibitor of HIV integrase, and later the nonlinear optical properties of fluorescent proteins along with the (nonlinear) optical properties and the behavior of small molecular dyes inside living cells. I started as a postdoctoral researcher here at Scripps Oceanography in 2014.