Team

Andrea grew up in Toronto, Canada, and spent many hours sailing on Lake Ontario. From a very young age, she has loved watery environments, dipping her toes into Ontario’s Muskoka lakes, Florida’s coastal waters, and even a neighbourhood pool. As a high school student, she travelled to Canada’s east coast and studied the great tides of the Bay of Fundy as part of a summer marine biology course, cementing her future career path to the study of aquatic science.

Andrea subsequently earned a Bachelor’s degree at the University of Guelph, Canada, studying marine and freshwater biology, and after graduating she interned at both the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada Great Lakes Laboratory located in Burlington, Ontario, where she studied everything from algae to fish habitat, and at the Mote Marine Laboratory & Aquarium in Florida, where she came face to face with a shark for the first time – and never forgot the experience! She then returned to university and completed a Master’s degree at the University of Guelph, investigating the population genetics of lake whitefish, followed by a doctorate at Nova Southeastern University (NSU), where she studied the population genetics of sharks, stingrays, and billfishes. She is currently an associate research scientist at NSU and the SOSF Shark Research Center, where she investigates the population dynamics of mainly sharks, with an emphasis on genetics and genomics-based ecology and conservation.