Victorian Marine Science Consortium
Isla is undertaking a PhD through The University of Melbourne; her supervisors are Professor Mick Keough and Dr Jan Watson.
Isla's project : Seasonality, seduction and foul play : the hydroid fauna of Port Phillip Bay aims to study how the hydroid communities of Port Phillip Bay are composed and how these communities change temporally and spatially with regards to larval recruitment and the presence, absence, growth and fertility of adult colonies. The study also examines hydroids as fouling species within local mussel culture operations, and the positive and negative role that non-indigenous hydroid species may play within farms in the bay. Isla's thesis will be the first documented assessment of the region's hydroid fauna, which are present in many marine communities and habitats throughout the world.
After completing an Honours degree at Edinburgh's Heriot Watt University, Isla moved to Australia with her Australian husband-to-be. After a stint of volunteering and paid work at Charles Sturt University, Isla then moved across the Tasman and worked for seven years as a marine ecologist with the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research. While working at NIWA, Isla developed a fascination with fouling communities on man-made structures; she realised then it was time to begin her own research. Isla moved back to Australia and commenced her PhD in July 2007.
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