Room: 303 Craig Mair      Phone: +44(0)1248 382588

E-mail: g.j.williams@bangor.ac.uk      Twitter 

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I graduated in Marine Biology (University of Liverpool) in 2004 and completed an MSc in Marine Environmental Protection (Bangor University) in 2006. I began a PhD in Marine Biology (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand) in 2007 in coral disease ecology, combining macroecology, experimental ecology, and histopathology to identify disease baselines and drivers of disease prevalence on Pacific coral reefs. A focus study site of mine was Palmyra Atoll, an uninhabited atoll in the Northern Line Islands. After obtaining my PhD in 2011, I was awarded a post-doctoral scholarship at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego (UCSD) where I continued to work on the macroecology of Pacific coral reefs. This role at Scripps transitioned into an Assistant Project Scientist position within the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation in 2013. I left Scripps in late 2015 to return to the UK and take up my full-time role within the School of Ocean Sciences at Bangor University.  

I am a marine ecologist specialising in coral reef ecology. My work focuses on the interaction of organisms with their environment, often taking a macroecological approach. I am particularly interested in how human activities and natural biophysical gradients interact to drive community patterns across multiple trophic levels (microbes to sharks) and scales (individual reefs to entire ocean basins). Much of my work incorporates remote coral reefs free from direct human impact, providing key replication at the unimpacted end of an intact-to-degraded ecosystem spectrum. By surveying across extensive geographical areas we address broad questions pertaining to: 1. the human, climatic and oceanographic drivers of coral reef ecosystem structure and function, 2. climate change impacts to coral reef ecosystems, 3. the spatial ecology of coral reefs, and 4. disease dynamics on coral reefs.

Research Areas 

• Marine Conservation and Resource Management
• Marine Ecology

I teach a range of undergraduate and postgraduate classes in marine ecology and applied statistics.

Current PhD students (primary supervisor)

• Danielle Spring (2023-present) - Thesis title: Biophysical links between oceanographic processes and coral reef benthic communities.
• Hana Amir (2023-present) - Thesis title: How do coral energy strategies influence their survival?
• Lisa Goberdhan (2021-present) - Thesis title: Functional role of uncharted coral reef habitats in the Anthropocene.
• Alice Lawrence (2019-present) - Thesis title: The natural and anthropogenic drivers of reef fish community structure and function across scales. 

Current PhD students (co-supervisor)

• Javier Gonzalez Barrios (2022-present) - Thesis title: Confronting the changing diversity patterns of coral reefs.
• Laura-Li Jeannot (2022-present) - Thesis title: Effects of seabird nutrient inputs on the productivity of coral reef fish communities.
• Megan O'hara (2021-present) - Thesis title: What drives cold pulses at remote tropical reefs?

Past PhD students

• Catherine Sheppard (2020-2024) - Thesis title: Do species interactions after overfishing enhance or inhibit coral reef recovery (Lancaster University)?
• Helen Ford (2017-2022) – Thesis title: The seascape ecology of disturbance and recovery on Pacific coral reefs.
• Tim Jackson-Bue (2016-2021) – Thesis title: The use of high-resolution remote sensing to advance temperate reef ecology.
• Anna Woodhead (2016-2021) – Thesis title: Capturing ecosystem service delivery from coral reefs (Lancaster University).
• Ellie Vaughan (2016-2021) – Thesis title: Quantifying nutrient signals on coral reefs (Lancaster University).

I have a range of research interests in which PhD projects could be developed. Please contact me by email in the first instance regarding any of the following areas: coral reef ecology, marine spatial ecology, oceanographic drivers of coral reefs, marine climate change impacts, marine disease ecology, and ecological statistics.