The recipient of this FAW award is a leader in the field of Marine Chemical Ecology. Her proposed research during the next five years will involve using techniques of natural products chemistry to address ecological and biochemical questions of tropical marine plant.herbivore interactions. Her focus will be on the importance of biological and physical causes of variation in the production of secondary metabolites by tropical seaweeds. The research is expected to provide important information on chemical variation and its causes, the ability of seaweeds to change their allocation of chemical defenses, the time scale for facultative chemical changes, and ecological relationships between seaweeds and tropical herbivores.
