Kristy Hill is the new lab manager for Grice Marine Lab’s Molecular Core Facility. She is originally from Greensboro, NC, and she and her fiancé are new to the Charleston area. After receiving her Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Science and Policy and Music at Duke University, she was a technician at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

She is excited to be at Grice and is looking forward to assisting faculty, staff, and students apply molecular methods to explore their various research questions. Please call or email her if you are interested in finding out how the Molecular Core Facility might be able to help you. After she finished her Masters, she was a research assistant in the Fisheries Genetics Lab with Drs. John Graves and Jan McDowell, where she worked on the population genetics of fishes, such as rays and spearfishes, using microsatellite markers. She most recently worked at the Smithsonian Institution on a project exploring the diversity of marine bivalve parasites along a latitudinal gradient—from Panama to the Mid-Atlantic, US—using standard molecular diagnostic methods as well as metagenomic methodology Lab with Drs. Gene Burreson and Ryan Carnegie. This experience sparked her interest in using molecular tools to answer ecological questions. After three years, she went back to school and completed her Masters in Marine Science at The College of William and Mary, where she was advised by Drs. Gene Burreson and Kimberly Reece. Her thesis project involved assessing the diversity, molecular phylogeography, and dispersal of a genus of protistan parasites of oysters (Bonamia spp.).