Eli Lewis

M.S., Marine Science

Advisor: Dr. Michael Graham. Thesis: Untangling the causes of the Island Species–Area Relationship.

B.S., Marine Biology

Coursework in marine, behavioral, and kelp forest ecology, ichthyology, and two field quarters (Hopkins Marine Station; Corsica, France).

Graduate Researcher, Phycology Lab

• Designed an integrated study testing four mechanisms (passive sampling, habitat heterogeneity, Island Biogeography Theory, and source–sink dynamics) for the Island Species–Area Relationship in Macrocystis pyrifera holdfast invertebrate communities.
• Pairs natural-holdfast sampling at two Monterey Peninsula sites with a marked-gastropod stocking experiment to directly measure immigration, emigration, and inter-patch migration.
• Built a reproducible R/Python pipeline (mobr, vegan, lme4, quantreg): GLMMs, power-law SAR fitting, rarefaction, and quantile regression, identifying a negative rarefied species–area relationship consistent with sink dynamics.

Ecological Assistant Intern

• Conducted coral, seagrass, and mangrove conservation surveys across the South Florida–Caribbean region using SCUBA.
• Analyzed long-term park monitoring data in R; trained and supervised new motorboat operators.

Field Technician, PISCO Subtidal MPA Monitoring

• Boat-based SCUBA monitoring of Central California kelp forests: fish transects, band transects, and size-frequency surveys.
• Data entry and quality control on large MPA monitoring datasets.

Kelp Forest Ecology Field Quarter

Investigated the effects of Sea Star Wasting Disease on prey of affected Asteroid spp. using subtidal surveys and time-series mixed modeling.

Corsica Field Quarter

Studied cleaning behavior of the wrasse Symphodus melanocercus, applying multivariate statistics to behavioral data.