Rate My Professor Claire Paris

Claire Paris is a Professor of Ocean Sciences in the Department of Ocean Sciences at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science, where she joined the faculty in 2009 and leads the Physical-Biological Interactions Laboratory. A biological oceanographer with expertise in larval ecology, coastal oceanography, and numerical modeling, she earned her M.S. from the Rosenstiel School in 1987. Her research focuses on bio-physical interactions during the early life history stages of fish and other marine organisms with planktonic phases, particularly larval dispersal, migration, ontogenetic vertical migrations, and the use of sensory cues such as chemical, acoustic, magnetic, and celestial signals for navigation to nursery or settlement habitats. Paris integrates oceanography, larval fish taxonomy, and ecology through numerical and empirical approaches to elucidate dispersion, fate, transport, connectivity, and resilience of marine populations. She has participated in over 24 oceanographic and ichthyoplankton expeditions across regions including the Florida Straits, Great Barrier Reef, Caribbean, Red Sea, Indo-Pacific, Mediterranean Sea, and Norwegian fjords. In the context of Geoscience, her work advances understanding of marine ecosystem dynamics and responses to stressors like pollution and climate change.

Paris has pioneered key tools widely used in the field: the open-source Connectivity Modeling System (CMS), a probabilistic Lagrangian software for tracking biotic and abiotic particles across scales, applied in NOAA fish stock assessments, global dispersal studies, paleo-climate research, and pollutant tracking; and the Drifting In Situ Chamber (DISC), a Lagrangian observational platform for detecting larval fish orientation and navigation cues in the pelagic environment. During the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, her CMS adaptations via NSF RAPID and GoMRI funding tracked the deep oil plume and informed response strategies; she serves as lead PI for the Near- and Far-field Modeling Task in the GoMRI C-IMAGE Consortium and Co-PI in the RECOVER Consortium. With over 100 peer-reviewed publications, notable works include "Scaling of connectivity in marine populations" (Science, 2006), "Connectivity of marine populations: open or closed?" (Science, 2000), "Connectivity Modeling System: A probabilistic modeling tool..." (Environmental Modelling & Software, 2013), and "Lagrangian ocean analysis: Fundamentals and practices" (Ocean Modelling, 2018). She received the 2018 American Geophysical Union Ocean Sciences Rachel Carson Lecture for her contributions, is President-Elect of the Early Life History Section of the American Fisheries Society, and Associate Editor for Frontiers in Marine Science.