In his newest book, Disease-Hunting Scientist, Edward Willett features FIU's Dr. Laurie Richardson and her work on coral reefs.  Dr. Richardson is a Professor of Biology at FIU and is researching black-band disease in coral reefs.  At 287,231 square kilometers, coral reefs are less than a 10th of a per cent of the total ocean floor.  However, coral reefs support more than a million species of marine life.  They are also dying from pollution, overfishing and black-band disease, among other reasons.

Richardson started her career researching “microbial mats,” communities of microbes that live in the sulfur-rich water of hot springs.  She then worked in Wisconsin on a NASA project that used satellite data in the study of aquatic ecosystems. That led to three years at NASA’s Ames Research Centre in California learning remote sensing and image processing, which in turn landed her in Florida with a NASA-funded grant to work on algal pigments and remote sensing.

As for black-band disease, Richardson says it’s now like a jigsaw puzzle that is maybe seven-eighths of the way filled in.  “Anything we figure out now is one more piece of the puzzle, so that is really exciting.”