Karen Maruska

Karen Maruska has been enamored with fish since early childhood. Growing up,she had fish tanks, did lots of fishing, and constantly begged her parents to go to aquariums. In school, she used every opportunity for class projects to do something with fish. In 7th grade, she used her mom’s fish-shaped pan to create a paper-mache fish mold and then used random objects to recreate all of a fish’s internal organs inside it. Then in 9th grade, she convinced her Earth Science teacher to let her write a paper about great white sharks!

Karen’s first real research opportunity in fish biology was in college when she worked in a lab that studied lampreys and salmon. Since then, she has worked on a variety of different fishes including sharks and stingrays, gar, toadfish, coral reef fishes such as damselfish, gobies, butterflyfish, wrasses, and now freshwater African cichlids.

Currently, Dr. Karen Maruska is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Louisiana State University (LSU). She graduated with a B.S. degree from University of New Hampshire, M.S. degree from Florida Tech, and Ph.D. degree from University of Hawaii at Manoa. She was a Grass Fellow in Neuroscience at the Marine Biological Lab in Woods Hole, and then an NIH postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University. Dr. Maruska has over 50 peer-reviewed publications and 8 book chapters on diverse topics ranging from sensory physiology to neural plasticity to reproductive function.

Dr. Maruska runs the Maruska Lab at LSU. At the lab, her current work uses the African cichlid fish Astatotilapia burtoni to study how fishes communicate in different sensory channels, and how the brain integrates all of this sensory information to allow the fish to make decisions necessary for reproduction and survival.

In order to relate her studies to the general public, Dr. Maruska and her lab have a blog called “Burt’s blog” which describes their research from the perspective of Burt the cichlid fish (and Toni, his girlfriend).

Dr. Karen Maruska is sponsored by Dave’s Rare Aquarium Fish.

Links

Maruska Lab

Cichlid Stage Interview

Burt’s Blog