Valeria Schmidt

Education:
B.A. Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Princeton University.
Research Interests:I received my undergraduate degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Princeton University in 2019. During my undergrad, I joined Dr. Daniel Sigman’s lab where I studied nutrient biogeochemistry of coral reef systems. During my summers, I conducted research under Dr. Samantha de Putron at BIOS, Dr. Anne Cohen at MIT-WHOI-BIOS, and Dr. Hollie Putnam at URI-HIMB. I studied the eco-physiology and environmental epigenetics of reef-building corals. After graduating, I joined Dr. Antonio Giraldez’s lab at Yale as a postgraduate associate. There, I studied RNA decay mechanisms and their role in the maternal-to-zygotic transition in Zebrafish.
I joined the Extavour lab fall of 2021 through the OEB program and I am interested in understanding how the immediate abiotic environment and biotic interactions drive an organism’s phenotype, ecological patterning, and evolutionary processes through the interaction of genetics, and epigenetics.