My name is Jade Hiraki Morris, and I started working with copepods in 2016 at the end of my sophomore year in high school when I began working with Dr. Julianne Passarelli on an unidentified species of harpacticoid in the family Porcellidiidae. For two years, I gathered field data on the prevalence, intensity, and distribution of this copepod, and presented the preliminary findings of this work at the 2017 ICOC. From 2018-2022, I continued my work on copepod systems at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This included an expansion of the porcellidiid work, as well as other more general copepod projects. The work that was presented at the 2022 e-ICOC with my colleague Sophia Lecuona is on a novel nicothoid egg predator that might potentially be an economically important parasite on a species of crab that supports a local fishery in southern California. Sophia and I plan to continue working on this species with a team of other colleagues in the lab of Dr. Armand Kuris. Recently, I have completed my bachelor’s degree in biology from UCSB. Since graduating, I have begun working as a staff educator at the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium and am completing my various copepod projects whilst planning to start graduate schools in Fall 2023.

It was a great honor to receive a Student Presentation Award at the e-ICOC 2022 meeting. I would like to thank the organizers of the e-ICOC for this award and for the fantastic job they did in organizing the first online ICOC.