Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore was raised on a farm in Iowa. She attended Colorado College where she began her studies of biology while also taking four years of performance piano. She earned her B.A. in biology there in 1975, her M.S. in animal ecology in 1977 from Iowa State University, and her Ph.D. in aquatic ecology in 1986 from Dartmouth College. Via a Fulbright Fellowship in 1978-1979, she explored zooplankton behavior in New Zealand. In 1980, she helped direct the Iowa Lakes Survey, ranking more than 100 lakes and reservoirs according to restoration priority. Predator-prey interactions between an insect predator and lake zooplankton was the focus of her dissertation research. She investigated effects of toxicants on plankton as well as supercooling strategies of stream and lake invertebrates while on a postdoctoral research appointment at Miami University from 1986-1988.
A member of the Department of Biological Sciences at Wellesley College since 1988, Moore has taught introductory biology, marine biology, tropical ecology (in Central America) and freshwater ecology. Since 2001, Moore has co-taught a field course for Wellesley and Russian students at Lake Baikal in Siberia. There she and her students learned of an unparalleled data set collected by three generations of a single family of Siberian scientists, leading Moore, her Russian colleague, Dr. Lyubov Izmest’eva, and additional scientists into an ongoing research collaboration (see link below). Moore received Wellesley’s Pinanski Prize for Excellence in Teaching in June 1997 and the Apgar Award for Innovation in Teaching in 2000.
Moore’s research focuses on freshwater plankton communities and how physical (temperature, light) and biological (predation) factors structure these communities. She is currently co-leading a team of Russian and American scientists who are analyzing a 60-year data set for Lake Baikal, the world’s oldest, deepest, largest (by volume) and most biotically diverse lake. Her working group, funded by the National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis, recently discovered that this remarkable lake – a living aquatic museum and a World Heritage Site – has warmed rapidly to a depth of 25 m and the base of the food web has reconfigured, potentially affecting the entire food web. Moore’s additional research focus is the penetration of artificial night lighting into lakes and its effects on movements and trophic interactions among zooplankton and fish. She has published widely in scientific journals including Limnology and Oceanography, Freshwater Biology, Aquaculture, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, and Hydrological Processes.
Lake Baikal course: http://www.wellesley.edu/Russian/Baikal/baikal.html Moore’s Web site & contact information: http://www.wellesley.edu/Biology/Faculty/Mmoore/home.html.
Profile last updated: 4/08