Heather Marlow recently joined faculty at the Department of Organismal Biology at UChicago, and focuses on developing genomic approaches to understand the evolution of marine invertebrates and their microbiome. Her previous work describes the regulation of cell specificity in the sea anemone Nematostella vectenis using scRNA-seq ( Cell, 2018). Heather has received funding from the Microbiome Center's latest round of Pilot Awards. It will be used to characterize the microbiota of Nematostella vectensis and other species, selected to represent various coastal aquatic habitats. This could lead to establishing these species and their associated microbiomes as harbingers of coastal health in the face of accelerating climate change.