Mary O’Connor

Dr. O’Connor is an Associate Professor in the Department of Zoology and Director of the Biodiversity Research Center at the University of British Columbia. Dr. O’Connor’s long-term research objective is to determine the adaptive capacity of biodiversity and ecosystem function in changing environments. The O’Connor Lab draws on unifying principles from diverse ecological disciplines to predict and explain how organisms, communities and ecosystems persist in changing environments. They document biodiversity in pristine and heavily impacted coastal marine seagrass meadows, they conduct experiments to find the limits of possible ecological responses to warming, and they develop theoretical and conceptual approaches to relate their observations to changes at larger and smaller scales. They use synthesis of data and theory, together with lab and field experiments to test critical assumptions and hypotheses to advance general knowledge about ecological change.