People in the lab
This page includes information about Dr. Hovel as well as current and former graduate and undergraduate students in the Hovel lab.
Current graduate students
Gulce Ozturk (MS Program)
gozturk3720@sdsu.edu
Gulce joined the lab in the fall of 2022. She is interested in restoration ecology and has extensive experience working on invasive species removal and species restoration throughout southern California. Gulce graduated with her Bachelor’s from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in 2016. After graduation, she gained a variety of experience with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, including work with the recreational fishery survey, lobster management project, and the white abalone restoration project. While working with white abalone, Gulce developed an interest in studying predator prey dynamics in southern California, which led her to the Hovel lab. Her research focuses on mitigating the domestication effect observed in captive bred white abalone, with the goal of developing a behavioral conditioning program to reduce abalone predation upon stocking into native habitat. Gulce’s research is funded by a Kenneth H. Coale Graduate Scholar Award from CSU COAST, the SDSU Retirement Association, and a Mabel Myers Memorial scholarship.
Lily Jorrick (MS Program)
ljorrick3646@sdsu.edu
Lily joined the Hovel lab in 2023. She graduated with a B.S. in Marine Biology from UC San Diego, where she did research that ranged in focus from invertebrate communities in estuaries, to fish developmental physiology, to dolphin social behaviors, before deciding to focus on conservation ecology in grad school. Lily is interested in the ways that species interactions and anthropogenic stressors can impact marine ecosystems, and in tangible conservation solutions for both marine and human coastal communities. Lily’s research is funded by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and by a Kenneth H. Coale Graduate Scholar Award from CSU COAST.
Jesse Humbert(PhD Program)
jhumbert1095@sdsu.edu
Jefferson (Jesse) Humbert grew up in Oregon at the base of Mt. Hood, after moving to Washington for college. Jesse began to explore the San Juan Islands and developed a passion for marine biology. After completing his masters in Marine Biology and teaching at Rosario Beach Marine Station, Jesse took a year off to work for National Geographic and travel. Upon discovering the Hovel Lab, Jesse returned to academia to further explore octopus behavior and marine environments. The basis of his research relies on deep sea motion detecting cameras which can record the activities of benthic invertebrates.
Ruby Miller (MS Program)
ruby.lupine@gmail.com
Ruby joined the lab in 2024. She got her B.S. in Marine Biology and minored in Chemistry at Oregon State University. She worked in the Menge Lubchenco lab where she helped monitor ecological communities along the Oregon coast in the context of global climate change. She has extensive experience working with anemones, studying the impacts of climate change and conducting observational studies on intertidal zonation pressures. She also worked closely with a postdoctoral researcher in the Weis lab, where she studied Aiptasia and how their algal symbiont presence and identity affected the growth and development of asexual offspring produced through pedal laceration. Ruby’s research interests center on invertebrates and photosynthetic organisms, particularly focusing on how ocean acidification affects their plasticity and interactions within the ecosystem. She hopes to apply this information to aid the conservation efforts against climate change.

Former Hovel lab graduate students
Jessica Griffin (PhD Program)
jessicaeileengriffin@gmail.com
Jessica’s website: https://jessica-griffin.weebly.com/
Jessica joined the lab in the fall of 2018. She graduated from the University of Connecticut with a Bachelor of Science Dual Degree in Environmental Science (with a Concentration in Natural Resource Management) and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. While doing her undergraduate program she did a variety of research projects including investigating the Influence of red tide algae on copepod prey selection, researching food quality and diet preferences in mysids, and studying walleye and lake trout patterns of movement in Lake Champlain.
Karl Koehler (MS Program)
kskoehler10@gmail.com
Karl joined the lab in the fall of 2019. He graduated from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine with a Bachelors in Earth and Oceanographic Science and a minor in Biology. While at Bowdoin Karl studied abroad at Otago University in New Zealand. He has worked as a naturalist instructor for the Catalina Environmental Leadership Program on Catalina Island, CA where he taught week long programs focused on marine ecology, cooperative problem solving, and environmental stewardship. His recent past includes a variety of other diverse experiences, such as: working in Alaska to help plan, assemble, and operate a new salmon buying outpost from the ground up; working as a blacksmith and general fabricator for an artist in Brunswick, Maine; working as a naturalist instructor for the Sierra Outdoor School; and working as an agricultural laborer in Dixmont, Maine. For his MS thesis, Karl studied the effects of eelgrass habitat structure on the composition and function of invertebrate communities found in the seagrass habitat of Mission Bay, San Diego. In particular, he explored the use of functional traits to look for generalizable patterns in the responses of organisms to habitat structure. Karl graduated from SDSU in 2022 and now works as a Marine Resource Scientist for the Maine Department of Marine Resources.
Vanessa Van Deusen (MS Program)
vanessa.van.deusen@gmail.com
Erica Pollard (MS Program)
eapollardd@gmail.com
Erica joined the lab in the fall of 2018 and graduated from SDSU in 2022. Erica completed her undergraduate degree at the University of California, Davis in 2014. Following graduation, she worked as a Research Assistant for UC Davis and Portland State University to study invasive species (Spartina, European green crab) in San Francisco Bay. Her love of crustaceans then led her to seek out the lobster party in the Hovel Lab at SDSU. For her thesis at SDSU, Erica studied food web dynamics within kelp forest systems across the Southern California Bight from the Northwestern Channel Islands to Baja California, Mexico. Specifically, she used the California spiny lobster as a model organism to identify the diet of a kelp forest predator and how this may vary spatially across the bight. To assess diet composition, Erica used stable isotopes to identify main food sources and the overall dietary niche breadth of lobsters. Erica now works as a Benthic Ecologist for the U.S. NAVY.
Robert Dunn (PhD Program)
rpdunn@ucdavis.edu
Robert graduated from the Joint Doctoral Program in Ecology in 2019. He then went on to do postdoctoral research in our lab until beginning his job as an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina’s Baruch Marine Field Laboratory, where he also is the Research Coordinator for the North Inlet-Winyah Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve.
At SDSU, Robert’s research focused on the ecological processes that control sea urchin population dynamics and habitat associations in kelp forests and on Caribbean coral reefs. For his dissertation, Robert combined field and lab experiments with mathematical modeling to describe how human processes (fishing) and natural processes (predation, recruitment, and behavior) interactively control sea urchin abundance and distribution. In addition to his experiments in local San Diego kelp forests, Robert’s conducted studies in Panama on urchin-coral-predator associations. In July 2016, Robert was awarded a NMFS-Sea Grant Fellowship in Marine Population Dynamics, and he also was the recipient of an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship when he did his master’s degree with Dr. David Eggleston at North Carolina State University. At SDSU, Robert also taught classes such as Life in the Sea, a large general education course about marine biology.




















Former Hovel lab undergraduate students
Undergraduate students have been an integral part of our lab. Any SDSDU undergraduate interested in independent study in the Hovel lab should contact Dr. Hovel.



