RESEARCH INTERESTS

• Parasitic and Microbial Diseases of Marine Organisms
  
  • Ecology of diseases and their hosts.
  • Impact of diseases on host populations.
  • Parasites as biological indicators of host populations.
  • Host-parasite interactions including pathology.
  • Etiology of disease and mortality agents.
  • Diseases of commercially important shellfish.
  • Marine invertebrate ecology.
  • Detection of disease agents in water and sediment samples.

Current Research

My expertise is in the etiology and epidemiology of parasitic and microbial diseases of commercially important fish and shellfish. Recently, I have been working in three distinct areas: the epidemiology and pathology of microbial and protozoal infections in crustaceans (blue crabs, snow crabs, clawed and spiny lobsters), the etiology of diseases in molluscs (oysters, hydrothermal vent mussels and abalone), and the toxicity of a group of harmful algae known colloquially as Pfiesteria.  

 I am an invertebrate zoologist and parasitologist by training and have worked on numerous systems. To illustrate, I have described 11 species from three Kingdoms, including a virus, a bacterium, 2 dinoflagellates, a cestode, 6 nemerteans and 3 isopods; and I have published several papers on fungal pathogens as well.  However, taxonomy is not my primary interest. My main interests are in the ecological associations between marine hosts and their pathogens. More recently, I have developed an interest in epidemiology and epidemiological statistics.

Most of my research has been on the diseases of crustaceans. This has included the first reported pathogenic virus from a lobster (Shields & Behringer 2004), the first report of healthy animals being able to detect and avoid diseased ones (Behringer et al. 2006), epidemiological studies on Hematodinium infections in crustaceans (e.g., Shields et al 2007), and the effects of egg predators on crab populations (e.g., Shields & Segonzac 2007). My work on species of Hematodinium, which are parasitic dinoflagellates in crustaceans, has uncovered many aspects of these parasites, including disease-induced mortalities to the fisheries, hematological and other host factors in the disease, the pathophysiology of infection, development of diagnostics, taxonomy and basic culture and cryopreservation requirements, and life cycle studies. My student and I have also been involved with the development of diagnostics for the detection and quantitation of the virus in spiny lobsters (Li et al. 2006, Li & Shields 2007, Montgomery-Fullerton et al. 2007, Li et al. 2008). This work has led to recent invited reviews of the diseases and parasites of lobsters and blue crabs (Shields et al. 2006, Shields & Overstreet 2007). 

I have recently been awarded a grant through the Ecology of Infectious Diseases Program at NSF and NIH. The grant is to study the relationship between fishing pressure, environmental factors and disease outbreaks in blue crabs in coastal bays of Virginia.

POTENTIAL STUDENTS
Students interested in working with me should contact me directly before applying to VIMS.  I must have grant funds in place to pay for students; and this is the single largest factor in deciding whether I can take additional students. Other factors are the GRE scores (minimum requirements are 600 in math and English), as well as a solid GPA and great letters. I also look at whether students have any research experience as an undergraduate. Students should also have taken courses in microbiology, parasitology, invertebrate zoology, ecology, or marine ecology, or related fields. I also highly recommend that you interview at VIMS prior to applying for graduate school here.