Dr. Cosima Porteus
Assistant Professor, University of Toronto Scarborough
Cosima Porteus received her BSc from the University of Guelph, Canada, majoring in Marine and Freshwater Biology. Early during her undergraduate degree, Cosima became involved in research on freshwater mussels, fish and salamanders and became fascinated by how aquatic animals cope with various environmental challenges. She stayed at the University of Guelph, where she earned her MSc in Integrative Biology under the supervision of Dr. Pat Wright, studying the parameters affecting the boundry layers and oxygen supply to developing fish. She then moved to the University of British Columbia, to start her PhD under the supervision of Dr Bill Milsom in the Department of Zoology. Her PhD thesis characterized time dependent changes that take place in the response to low oxygen in fish, highlighting the importance of peripheral oxygen chemoreceptors in establishing these time domains.
As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Exeter under the supervision of Prof Rod Wilson, Cosima determined why fish exposed to ocean acidification lose their ability to respond appropriately to olfactory cues that are vital for their survival in the wild. The results of this research combined behaviour, electrophysiology and transcriptomics to show a novel mechanism for how ocean acidification affects the behaviour of fish through the olfactory system.
She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough, where her lab is continuing to study the effects and physiological mechanisms of anthropogenic stressors on aquatic animals. Her group have recently shown that ocean acidification negatively affects olfaction in Dungeness crabs, an economically important crustacean, in a similar way as in fish. These findings have wide implications for issues ranging from global food security, marine conservation to recreational and commercially-important fisheries.
