Hi, my name is Hannah!
- hannahkish6
- May 27
- 2 min read
I’ve always known that I wanted to be a coral researcher. I grew up in Michigan, the home state of the iconic Great Lakes. Millions of years ago, these lakes were saltwater seas that housed an ancient coral reef system. As the seas turned to lakes, the tiny coral polyps fossilised to create what is locally known as ‘Petosky Stones’. Many summers were spent along the beach of Lake Michigan stumbling across Petosky Stones, not fully appreciating I was collecting millions of year old coral skeletons. At some point, I learned exactly what these stones were and the modern day equivalent. Specifically we learned about the Great Barrier Reef, and how these tiny animals have created a structure so big it can be seen from space. Maybe it was my keen interest in geology (okay okay rock collecting) or it was how ~fun~ that space fact was – regardless, corals captured my attention.
From there I did what any impassioned and ambitious kid does, scour colleges for Marine Biology degrees; pitch an Australian exchange program to my parents (it failed); create a whole binder of how I was going to have a career in marine biology and bring it to my college interview (very unnecessary and never referenced); take a gap year for SCUBA certs, volunteer (a lot), and do unpaid internships (fancy volunteering), and more volunteering before I finally secured my first job at a non-profit 20 years after learning about coral reefs and five years after leaving college.
I definitely have lost track of that binder, but I am pretty sure I didn’t take my intended path and while I still don’t feel like I’ve ‘made it’ after a decade into this career path, I am still incredibly impassioned (and ambitious) to work in this field. My PhD is an iteration of a long-thought (dreamt) of topic about coral larval dispersal. I get to look at coral larvae (babies) to assess their swimming and sensing capabilities. I take pictures of the patterns they make in water to see if these patterns change in response to different chemical cues. I also look at their spatial use while their swimming in both the 2D and 3D environment to see if their swimming changes in response to cues and water flow. These traits are then incorporated into a dispersal model for better precision and accuracy when predicting coral recovery dynamics. My project has way more physics, chemistry and coding (so much coding) than I initially thought. And though I will probably share a lot about my project, I am hoping that I can share (and warn and ask) about all the other stuff about a PhD that I never knew or never found a satisfactory answer to during one of the dozens of google searches.
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