Distinguished Professor Debashish Bhattacharya Appointed to National Academy of Sciences Committee Addressing Interventions to Increase the Resilience of Coral Reefs

On January 12, 2018 Prof. Debashish Bhattacharya of the Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology was appointed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to serve on the committee to discuss and report on strategic Interventions to Increase the Resilience of Coral Reefs. Prof. Bhattacharya?s lab studies coral genome evolution, population structure, and coral responses to abiotic stress, with the goal of identifying the 'genetic toolkit' used by these species to adapt to environmental fluctuations.

This committee has multiple tasks. These include to review the state of the art in ecological and genetic interventions that can be used to enhance recovery and persistence of coral reefs. The committee will consider scenarios and solutions that address the next 5-20 years which will see serious deterioration in the reef environment due to warming, more acidic waters. The committee will provide an environmental risk assessment and develop a decision pathway for implementation of potential interventions that includes knowledge gained from genetic, genomic, and ecological data. Two reports will result from this initiative.

The committee is chaired by Steven Palumbi, who is the Jane and Marshall Steel Professor in Marine Sciences and Senior Fellow with the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. According to the announcement by the Academies, the ?study is focused on the state-of-the-science of novel intervention strategies to identify and compare potential ecological risks and benefits.?

The committee will hold 5 meetings at different sites in the US, with the first scheduled for Washington DC on February 7-9, 2018.