We had a great meeting with Charlotte Seid, Ph.D. – Benthic Invertebrates of the Southeastern Pacific in May.

Dr. Charlotte Seid is the manager of the Benthic Invertebrate Collection at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

Charlotte received her Ph.D. in Biology from MIT in 2014 and her undergraduate degree in Chemical and Physical Biology from Harvard University in 2010. Prior to joining Scripps in 2017, she managed a marine DNA repository at Northeastern University and worked on lobster health research at the New England Aquarium. Some of Charlotte’s previous underwater adventures include visiting the Aquarius Undersea Laboratory and diving in the submersible Alvin.

Charlotte’s work in the Benthic Invertebrate Collection supports biodiversity research, new species descriptions, education, and outreach at Scripps and beyond.

The Collection houses more than 45,000 specimens from diverse habitats worldwide, with a focus on deep-sea ecosystems. During this cruise, Charlotte will focus on preserving and documenting specimens to facilitate team members’ projects, to ensure safe long-term storage at Scripps, and to make these priceless materials discoverable to the broader scientific community (https://scripps.ucsd.edu/collections/bi).

We will be putting together a tour of the Benthic Invertebrate Collection, and maybe a tour with manager Ben Frable at Scripps Oceanography’s Marine Vertebrate Collection.