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Kari L. Lavalli

/tlc/IMAGES/kari.jpeg (3000 bytes)Kari Lavalli was born in Michigan and grew up in a suburb of Detroit, but one that was surrounded by a woods. She tortured her parents by capturing every possible creature she could and bringing them into the house. Thus she was destined to do something that involved animals. At first she thought that would be veterinary school, but after taking an animal behavior course in Woods Hole in her sophomore year of college, she became more and more interested in pursuing research. Nonetheless, her path to lobsters was torturous. First she studied the sensory biology of homing pigeons, then the biological models that people use to predict whale populations that sustain fisheries in Japan, then the mating behavior of butterflies, and finally the behavioral ecology of lobsters. She has a B.A. from Wells College, a Ph.D in Biology from the Boston University Marine Program in Woods Hole, MA and has completed two postdoctoral fellowships--one at Northeastern University's Marine Science Center and one at the University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel as a Fulbright Fellow. Her graduate school publications focus on the feeding mechanisms of newly settled lobsters, while her post graduate publications focus on the internal feeding structures of lobsters, the role of lobster hatcheries in research and reseeding efforts, general ecology and behavior of lobsters, and the antipredator mechanisms of adult lobsters. For 4 years, she worked as an Assistant Professor at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas, expanding and running their marine program as well as offering animal behavior and behavioral ecology courses. Her teaching skills earned her a teaching award in the School of Science. While there, she pursued her interests in slipper lobster morphology and feeding behavior as well as the evolution of gregariousness in spiny lobsters for the purpose of cooperative defense (with collaborator William Herrnkind). She now splits her time between teaching part-time, participating in Florida State University's inservice program for K-12th grade science teachers (Marine Biology for Teachers, A Model for Inquiry-Based Teaching), and pursuing further clawed lobster research with The Lobster Conservancy and further spiny lobster research with her colleagues in Florida.

Feel free to email me.

Lavalli's CV
Lavalli's Publications

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