Research Interests of Sarah Cohen I am interested in how ecological, behavioral, and environmental features shape evolution and genetic systems in diverse organisms. Most of our work in marine and estuarine settings has asked questions about how life history, physiological, or behavioral attributes of species affect population structure. Often the results directly address questions about coastal and marine conservation related to our ability to detect, predict, and remediate anthropogenic effects on natural populations. In addition, I have a particular interest in the ecology and evolution of recognition systems and have been investigating this both in colonial invertebrates and estuarine fishes. Current projects include: immunogenetic (Major Histocompatibility Complex) variation in fish populations of varying size, the use of genetic markers to detect anthropogenic effects related to invasions, reproductive ecology of sea stars, distributions of parasites in estuarine and marine hosts, evolved tolerance for contaminants in estuarine populations, genetic tools for estimating population linkage in estuarine and marine species including urchins, lobsters, fish, seastars, copepods, seagrasses, and tunicates, and phylogenetic relationships between various marine taxa at the family level (e.g., fish and tunicates). Other projects have included oxygen diffusion in egg masses of snails and worms and implications for egg mass design, mating systems and inbreeding depression in tunicates, intertidal biodiversity surveys and methods, and behavioral variation in colonial marine invertebrates. We use research methods ranging from the high to very low tech, indoor to outdoor, and dry to wet.