Elizabeth Hamman

Biography

Elizabeth is a quantitative marine and aquatic ecologist who combines theoretical and empirical approaches.  She attended New College of Florida for her undergraduate degree, where she graduated with a joint concentration in Marine Biology/Applied Mathematics and continued to the University of Florida for her Ph.D.  There, she participated in an NSF IGERT program, QSE3 (Quantitative Spatial Ecology, Evolution, and the Environment).  In 2014, Elizabeth transferred to the Odum School of Ecology at the University of Georgia where she completed her PhD in 2017.  Prior to joining the faculty at St. Mary’s in 2021, Elizabeth had postdocs in the Biology Department at East Carolina University and Radford University, and the Math Department at Tulane University.  

Her lab at St. Mary’s will combine field and lab experiments with quantitative modeling to address questions in coastal systems.  Particularly, she is interested in 1) What are the causes and consequences of spatial patterning in ecological systems, particularly those with biogenic habitats (e.g. coral reefs and saltmarshes)? 2) How do factors (e.g. stressors, predators) interact to create unexpected effects? and 3) How does methodology (both field and statistical) lead to different conclusions?  Elizabeth is also very interested in improving the quantitative aspect of undergraduate biology education.  Building off past work with QUBES (Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis), she is currently on the steering committee of the newly formed NSF-funded Research Coordination Network BIOGRAPHI (Biologists and graph interpretation).