I am a Postdoctoral Fellow working in the Rochman lab (St. George campus) and the McMeans lab (Mississauga campus) as part of the pELAstics project. I study how microplastic exposure affects aquatic food webs using stable isotopes and fatty acids analyses.
I finished my doctoral work at the University of Victoria in 2021. I have extensive experience in food web ecology, methods for extracting and measuring microplastics in aquatic samples and statistics. My work has been in both marine and freshwater environments.
Aquatic contaminants are often studied by exposing single organisms in the laboratory and interpreting effects at the individual level over relatively short time periods. As an aquatic ecologist, I seek to study the more complicated scenario in which contaminants and other potential stressors are effecting whole food webs, leading to both direct and indirect effects.
Dr. Garth Covernton 