The Team

Kara Rising, MSc

Kara is a PhD student under the supervision of Professor Michael Sweet at the University of Derby. Kara has been a menace to both her family and friends throughout her life, forcing them to listen to her marine science facts at every opportunity. Now she is in a position that encourages the learning and sharing of marine science facts, therefore turning her into an even greater nuisance to all those around her.

Before starting her PhD at Derby, Kara worked for the coral reef restoration non-profit, SECORE International, where she learned about sexual coral reproduction from great scientific minds around the world. In 2020, she left the USA to further pursue her passions and received an MSc in Marine Environmental Management at the University of Exeter in Penryn, UK. Here she focused her research on how anthropogenic noise impacts mating behaviour of the shore crab, Carcinus maenas under Professor Martin Stevens. In 2021, she graduated and began working with Professor Mike Sweet at the University of Derby as a Research Technician in Coral Biology, helping to support research projects and maintain their Aquatic Research Facility. Now, during her PhD, Kara’s work is mainly focused on seagrass and how we can improve our understanding of seagrass ecology and physiology through standardising monitoring methods, microbiome manipulation and knowledge sharing around the world. While she has been studying in the UK, her husband, Jon, continues to bravely support her and care for their Boston Terrier, Icky, in Ohio, USA.

Professor Michael Sweet

Professor Sweet is a molecular ecologist based at the University of Derby, UK. He is head of the Aquatic Research Facility and the Nature-based Solutions Research Centre. He has a particularly interest in health and disease of marine organisms and his work has focused on corals, sponges, urchins, fish and most recently seagrass. More recently his teams attention has moved onto the importance of the microbiome in organism health and how (or even, if) these host-associated microbiota can aid in the fight against climate change. To do this, they assess shifts in the microbiome of healthy and stressed individuals (via means of histology and next generation sequencing, for example) and explore the effects such shifts have on the host of interest (visual appearance, transcriptomics, metabolomics, proteomics etc). Combined (with detailed bioinformatics and downstream analysis) we can then understand how individual microbes react with others in their community - under various scenarios. The overall goal is always to unpick the true importance and function of these microbes and what they do for the host and importantly what happens if these networks/interactions break down.