Joris van der Ham

Joris has moved on to new opportunities. Good luck!

Louisiana State University
Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences

I am building a molecular phylogeny of the deep-sea octocoral family Primnoidae, which has more than 35 genera distributed in all oceans and to depths of more than 4000 meters. The project complements a morpholgical cladistic analysis being done by Dr. Stephen Cairns of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Within this family is the genus Candidella, whose species C. imbricata is common on the New England Seamounts and host to a polychaete, Gorgoniapolynoe caeciliae, that lives in tunnels on the colony branches. With Dr. Tim Shank's research group at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, we are exploring whether the coral and polychaete are co-evolving on these North Atlantic seamounts.

Education

M.S., University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• phylogenetics of gammarid amphipods
Ph.D., University of Louisiana at Lafayette
• functional morphology and evolutionary history of the injecting apparatus of remipede crustaceans

Publications

van der Ham, J.L., M.R. Brugler and S.C. France. 2009. Exploring the utility of an indel-rich, mitochondrial intergenic region as a molecular barcode for bamboo corals (Octocorallia: Isididae) Marine Genomics 2: 183-192 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.margen.2009.10.002)

The primnoid octocoral Calyptrophora microdentata on Manning Seamount.