Dr. Chris J. Law

My name is Chris Law and I go by he, him.

Yes.

Dr. Chris Law.

Yeah.

So I essentially started my science career with polychaete worms during my undergrad at UC San Diego.

And then as I was applying grad school, I met with my future PhD advisor, Rita Meda at UC Santa Cruz.

And we're just chatting about potential research projects.

And she studies moray eels.

So I was just assuming I was going to be working on some fish project, which is fine because my plan is just to go up the food chain.

But then we were just chatting a little bit and she just brought up the idea, why don't you just work on sea otters?

Because we're in Santa Cruz and they're just all over the place.

And obviously I was like, yeah, of course.

I've seen them before, and they're adorable little teddy bears that you just want to hug, and who doesn't want to work on them?

So the moment she said that, I kind of just jumped on that bandwagon and started doing some research into what potential projects I could do.

And since they eat all these hard shell parietums,

one of the questions we really wanted to look at is just how are they actually breaking into those hard items?

So kind of just got started on that.

So basically, in undergrad, I come from like a phylogenetics background and evolutionary background.

So I'm kind of halfway through working with sea otters or starting to look into sea otters, I just got this idea, I have to build a phylogenetic tree of all of the

Not only otters, but the weasels, marns, wolverine, all those guys.