Maverick Under the Sea

Kelsey Beavers’ love of the ocean started at a young age. Coming from a family of avid scuba divers, she became a certified junior diver at age 11.

“It was a different world,” Beavers says. “I loved everything about the ocean.”

After graduating from high school, the Austin native moved to Fort Worth to study environmental science at Texas Christian University. One of her professors knew Laura Mydlarz, biology professor at UTA, and encouraged Beavers to continue her studies in Arlington.

“Kelsey came to UTA to pursue a PhD and study coral disease, and she quickly got involved in a large project studying stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD), a rapidly spreading disease that has been killing coral all along Florida’s coast and in 22 Caribbean countries,” says Dr. Mydlarz, a leading researcher in coral disease and immunity. “She has been a real asset to our team, including being the lead author on a paper we published in Nature Communications last year.”

As part of her doctoral work, Beavers completed original research studying the gene expression of coral reefs affected by SCTLD. This involved scuba diving off the coast of the U.S. Virgin Islands to collect coral tissue samples before returning to the lab for data analysis. For her disseration, she crunched large sets of gene expression data extracted from the coral samples and analyzed it in the context of disease susceptibility and severity.

“We found that the symbiotic algae living within coral are also affected by SCTLD,” Beavers says. “Our current hypothesis is that when algae move from reef to reef, they may be spreading the disease that has been devastating coral reefs since it first appeared in 2014.”