He received his PhD from Temple University and was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Barbara and the University of Maine. Jay is broadly interested in understanding the impacts of climate change on deep-sea corals at the cellular and organismal levels; his PhD work explored the effects of ocean acidification on Lophelia in the Gulf of Mexico and his postdoctoral research brought him to the Southern Ocean to study the impacts of ocean warming on larval development and cellular necrosis on Antarctic deep-sea corals. On the DEEP SEARCH project, Jay is working with Erik’s lab to describe the oceanographic conditions of the coral habitats in the study area, particularly temperature, oxygen, and pH, as well as physical data obtained from the long-term benthic lander deployments.