Hello! I am a recent PhD graduate from James Cook University and the Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Townsville, Australia). Currently, I am a postdoctoral research fellow in Prof. Craig Franklin’s lab at the University of Queensland (St. Lucia/Brisbane, Australia), investigating the impact of Ultra-Violet Radiation on coral reef fish development.
I was born in Canada, and from a young age had a passion and admiration for wildlife. At the age of 7 I became fascinated with Australia and its amazing animals, and made it my life’s work to eventually visit and hopefully someday live.
I did my undergraduate degree (1st class honors) at the University of New Brunswick (Saint John campus) majoring in marine biology (2011-2015). I work for a marine invertebrate ecology lab during my first year, and subsequently joined Prof. Jim Kieffer’s sturgeon eco-physiology lab in my second year. I worked on salinity tolerance of juvenile shortnose sturgeon for my honors research (Research Theme I). Additionally, I also worked on understanding swimming behaviour of juvenile sturgeon (Research Theme I).
In 2016 I joined A/Prof Jodie Rummer’s lab at James Cook University and the Australian Research Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Townsville campus) for a year-long internship. My role was to help out graduate students with their projects, however, during this period I became interested in the high swimming capabilities of coral reef fish larvae. This internship gave me the valuable opportunity and time to begin to investigate questions around the ‘athletic’ capabilities of young reef fishes, which would form into my PhD.
I started my PhD in 2017 under the supervision of A/Prof Jodie Rummer, Prof Mark McCormick, Dr. Peter Cowman and Dr. Bjorn Illing. My PhD took a multi-disciplinary approach, integrating phylogenetics, whole-animal physiology, muscle tissue development and genetic and cellular metrics, to better understand how coral reef fish larvae develop into impressive swimmers (Research Theme II) .
Upon completing my PhD in 2021, I received a Company of Biologists Travel Grant to join Prof. Craig Franklin’s Eco-Physiology group at the University of Queensland. In collaboration with Dr. Fabio Cortesi (Queensland Brain Institute, UQ), my current post-doc work will investigate how exposure to UV radiation from the sun during the embryo phase for reef fishes may impact performance during later life stages (Research Theme III).
For more details and links to publications on my current research themes, please check out my ‘Research Interests’ section
Dr. Adam T. Downie, PhD 