Dr. Ruth Gates and her group focus their research on coral reefs, marine ecosystems that protect coastlines, support tourism and provide nutrition to many island nations. The global deterioration in the quality of these ecosystems has been widely reported over the last 40 years, reflecting the complex interaction between climate change stressors (thermal anomalies, ocean acidification and storms) and chronic or acute local impacts (coastal development, pollution and over-fishing). Although the future looks bleak, some corals survive, and even thrive in the same conditions that rapidly kill others. Our group seeks to better understand the biological underpinnings of this variability by defining traits that associate with environmental sensitivity and resistance in corals, and with the resilience (capacity to buffer stress) of reefs. Our goal in conducting this research is to contribute basic and applied scientific knowledge that expands understanding of how coral reefs function, and informs the management and conservation of these beautiful but threatened ecosystems.

The Gates Lab is located at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, a research unit embedded within the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.  This facility combines close proximity to a living coral reef with the capacity to support a range of training and research activities that include fieldwork, laboratory experiments and state-of-the-art cell and molecular analyses. The Gates Lab group encompasses researchers at the undergraduate, graduate, postdoctoral and professional researcher levels, and we actively promote scientific communication and collaboration by rapidly disseminating research products and hosting a diversity of national and international research visitors. Our research crosses a variety of spatial scales (molecules, cells, tissues, colony, community, reef) and draws on tools from the fields of molecular genetics, functional genomics, bioinformatics, histology, cell biology, biochemistry, physiology and ecology. We have study sites in the Main and North Western Hawaiian Islands, Moorea (French Polynesia), American Samoa, Taiwan and St. John (USVI), and our work is supported by a combination of federal, state and private funding agencies. This website introduces the Gates lab personnel and highlights some of our current research and outreach activities.

Pocillopora damicornis larva (bright field)

Pocillopora damicornis larva (confocal)

Website Design by H Putnam.  Last Updated April 2013