Nina Santos

Nina Santos is a Ph.D. student at the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory (CBL) at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES). She works with Dr. Ryan Woodland and is very broadly interested in aquatic food web ecology. For her dissertation research, Nina works within the Patuxent River, a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay, where she focuses on small shrimp-like crustaceans called mysids. Mysids are an important but understudied part of many estuarine and coastal food webs, and Nina’s research as an MDSG fellow will focus on understanding more about mysids habitat preferences. This work will provide a direct approach for understanding habitat preferences of mysids in the Bay, the dominant prey taxon for many regionally important finfish species. 

Nina completed an M.Sc. in Biological Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island in 2020, where her thesis was focused on potential climate change impacts on coastal southern New England food webs. For that project, she focused on using multiple techniques to understand the diet and potential for overlap of Atlantic cod, an iconic New England species, and the black sea bass, a species commonly found in southern New England waters but that is experiencing a population increase and northward range shift as climate change warms waters off New England. Nina graduated with a B.Sc. in Biology from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth in 2016. She currently serves as the Vice President for the UMCES student chapter of the American Fisheries Society and she also serves as a student representative for CBL’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee. In her free time, Nina likes reading, being outside, and hanging out with her dog, Goose.