Dr. Tina Barbasch of the Buston Lab was selected as the winner of the 2021 Belamarich Award for her doctoral dissertation in Biology titled “How Do Parents Respond to Changing Ecological and Social Environments: Insights from a Coral Reef Fish with Biparental Care.” This award is given annually to a recent PhD candidate for their outstanding doctoral dissertation completed in the Department of Biology. Tina’s dissertation was outstanding due to the impact and novelty of her work, including its interdisciplinary nature. Tina’s ability to combine theory and experiment was remarkable, putting her in a great position to receive a postdoctoral fellowship award. It was clear from her application that a broad community of scientists felt that her work was particularly groundbreaking. Tina’s productivity, creativity, and inventiveness propelled her lab’s research program in a new direction. In addition, her success as dual educator-researcher during her dissertation impressed faculty from across Biology. More information about her research is below.
Parents can go to incredible lengths to improve the survival of their offspring, but providing care comes at the expense of other activities, such as foraging and investing in future reproductive opportunities. Tina’s dissertation research used the clown anemonefish as a study system to explore the environmental and social factors influencing how much care parents provide to their offspring. She combined laboratory and field manipulations with theoretical models to create a framework for understanding how and why parents provide costly parental care. This research ultimately contributes to our ability to predict how individuals and populations will respond to environmental changes. Next, she plans to explore how the parental brain manages the multiple, competing demands that accompany parenting.
Tina will begin an NSF postdoc this September at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign in the lab of Dr. Alison Bell to study the genomics of parental care.
More about the Belamarich Award:
Frank A. Belamarich joined the BU Biology Department in 1963 as an assistant professor where he quickly gained international recognition for his research in the field of comparative hemostasis, the process of blood clotting. Throughout his tenure at BU he was a popular teacher of a core course in cell biology which he developed. Belamarich maintained research laboratories in Boston as well as at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole in Falmouth, MA as part of the BU Marine Program.
Congratulations, Tina!