Current affiliation

Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences (BIOS), Saint George’s, Bermuda

Research interests

• Coral reef ecology and coral physiology
• Seagrass ecology
• Energy and carbon budgets of corals and seagrass
• Global change biology 
• Coral bleaching mitigation strategies

Yvonne is a marine benthic ecologist with a focus on coral reefs and seagrass meadows.  She received her PhD from the Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Ecology in Germany, where she studied the resilience of coral communities to natural and anthropogenic disturbances. Following this, Yvonne worked at GEOMAR Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research Kiel, where she investigated coral adaptive mechanisms to strong latitudinal temperature and nutrient gradients in the Red Sea and seagrass thermal tolerance in the Baltic Sea. In June 2016, Yvonne joint BIOS addressing questions about the interaction of organisms and communities with their environment. Originally being part of a NASA mission assessing reef functioning via remote sensing, she is now running her own lab and expanded her lines of research to finding ways to mitigate the heat-stress related loss of coral reefs using geo-engineering tools. Yvonne has a lot of experience working in developing countries in South-East Asia and in the Middle East, while she has also conducted research in various places of the Pacific and the wider Caribbean.