Welcome! I’m Paradyse Blackwood, a disease ecologist and toxicologist. My research focuses on how the changing environment will influence organisms' health, morphology, and their interactions. I earned my Ph.D., at Purdue University in the Department of Biological Sciences, with a concentration in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in 2024. At Purdue, I worked with Dr. Catherine Searle. My dissertation work focused on how environmental changes including climate change and pollution interact and affect disease dynamics in amphibians in freshwater systems in the Midwest USA.

 

Currently, I am a Sentinels of Change Alliance Postdoctoral Fellow in Marine Host-Parasite Dynamics with the University of British Columbia and Hakai Institute where I am co-advised by Drs. Alyssa Gehman, Chris Harley, and Kayla King. My research will utilize field and lab experiments to explore how climate change and environmental variation are connected in determining parasitic infection dynamics in intertidal marine invertebrates in the Salish Sea.