Department of Biology

Timothy Lee

Research

I am originally from Seoul, South Korea and raised in the Pacific Northwest, where I have acquired my long-standing fascination with aquatic ecosystems. Over the years, I have participated in many exciting projects across the world, including sampling demersal fishes in the Sea of Japan and surveying benthic macroinvertebrates in Oregon and Washington’s continental shelf habitats just to name a couple. In collaboration with researchers at the University of Washington and Washington Sea Grant, I also completed an assessment on coastal macroinvertebrate community responses to shoreline armoring removal in the Puget Sound’s coastlines. During my PhD, I completed a large-scale biogeographic study along the U.S. east coast to describe patterns of free-living and parasitic invertebrate communities associated with invasive alga Gracilaria vermiculophylla, and understanding prevalence of parasitic barnacles along salinity gradients in the Pamlico and Neuse Rivers of North Carolina. As a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Terui’s lab, I am interested in determining which environmental predictors influence complex food web dynamics in riverine systems using quantitative approaches.

Recent publications

Lee, T.S., Fowler, A.E., Krueger-Hadfield, S.A., Gabriel, C., Blakeslee, A.M.H. (In Review). Biogeographic patterns of community diversity associated with an introduced alga. Diversity and Distributions. 

Blakeslee, A.M., Pochtar, D.L., Fowler, A.E., Moore, C.S., Lee, T.S., Barnard, R.B., Swanson K.M., Lukas, L.C., Ruocchio, M., Torchin, M.E., Miller, A.W., Ruiz, G.M., & Tepolt, C. K. (2021). Invasion of the body snatchers: the role of parasite introduction in host distribution and response to salinity in invaded estuaries. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 288(1953), 20210703.

Lee, T.S., Toft, J.D., Cordell, J.R., Dethier, M.N., Adams, J.W., & Kelly, R.P. (2018). Quantifying the effectiveness of shoreline armoring removal on coastal biota of Puget Sound. PeerJ, 6, e4275.