People    

Dr. Christopher Marshall is the Director of the Gulf Center for Sea Turtle Research. He oversees the research consortium and its activities, the Upper Texas Coast Sea Turtle Stranding and Salvage Network and the Sea Turtle Rehabilitation Hospital .

Theresa Morris is a Program Assistant with the Gulf Center for Sea Turtle Research. Her primary duties are sea turtle rehabilitation and water quality control with our new sea turtle hospital. Theresa is also involved in the sea turtle stranding network and educational outreach.

Paige oversees our long-term nesting program, the Sea Aggie Sea Turtle Patrol. We patrol 87 miles of beach from the Texas-Louisiana border to Surfside Texas. The mission is to relocate Kemp’s ridley sea turtle eggs, and any sea turtle eggs, to Padre Island National Seashore’s incubation facility where they can be better protected. This program involved 300+ volunteers from the Galveston Bay Area Chapter of the Texas Master Naturalists, Galveston community member, and students from Texas A&M University at Galveston.

John oversees our UTV maintenance, deployment, and fuel supply for the Sea Aggie Sea Turtle Patrol. He is also involved in nesting program training, is a member of nest response team, and participated in all of the Gulf Center for Sea Turtle Research’s Conservation Programs.

Dr. Khanh’s research focuses on the form, function, and evolutionary history of beaks. Her dissertation focused the keratinous beaks of birds. Now she and Dr. Marshall are working on the functional morphology of beaks in sea turtles. Specifically, she is investigating the morphological (attachment styles, crushing surface morphology, foramina patterns) and material property (keratin hardness, thickness, and composition) differences in the rhamphothecae (beaks) between durophagous (crushing) and non-durophagous turtles.

Madelyn is leading our in-water sea turtle field team and is interested the movement ecology of Galveston Bay Estuary System sea turtles using satellite and acoustic instrumentation. Her work uses Bayesian State Space Models and GAMMS to understand the drivers of sea turtle movement.