Keynote speakers > Pr Claire B. PARIS-LIMOUZY

Claire Paris is a biological oceanographer with expertise in biophysical modeling of dispersal, transport and migration, as well as in larval fish taxonomy. She graduated from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook, NY, with a Ph.D. in Coastal Oceanography. Her early studies on the transport dynamics of fish larvae set the groundwork that led to an unprecedented outlook on larval migration and marine population connectivity. 

Claire Paris developed numerical and empirical Lagrangian tools that she distributed freely to be used worldwide. She released the open-source Connectivity Modeling System (CMS), a state-of-the-art, probabilistic Lagrangian application that virtually tracks biotic and abiotic particles in the ocean. The CMS is used by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to improve predictions of recruitment indices of commercial species, and by the scientific community to track plankton migrations, map population connectivity to design marine reserve networks, study paleo-climate, and track pollutants including oil spills to micro-plastics and large marine debris. Paris pioneered the concept of Lagrangian behavioral chambers to detect the navigation of planktonic organisms in response to environmental cues. She designed and built a series of trademarked Drifting In situ Chamber (DISC) instruments, that are distributed to overseas laboratories for plankton research. 

Claire Paris  is a professor in the UM Rosenstiel School's department of Ocean Sciences. She brought recognition to the key role of biophysical interactions between planktonic organisms and the pelagic environment on the resilience of marine ecosystems to stressors such as overexploitation, marine pollution, and changes in climatic conditions. She leads a team of Postdoctoral Fellows and Graduate Students at the Physical-Biological Interactions Laboratory where the CMS is maintained and the DISC is produced.