Chris Goodchild
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Chris Goodchild, Ph.D. student. Major advisor: Sarah DuRant. Ecotoxicology, physiology, bioenergetics.
B.S. 2011, University of Oklahoma M.S. 2014, University of New England. Email: christopher.goodchild@okstate.edu |
Specific Interests
In broad terms, my research examines the physiological effects of environmental contaminants on a variety of organisms and aims to establish mechanistic links between subcellular indicators and ecologically relevant effects (e.g., whole-animal fitness, population-level endpoints). Although subcellular “biomarkers” are often used as “early warning indicators” of stress, they have limited ability to predict higher order consequences of exposure to contaminants. In my research, rather than assessing stress by using a set of traditional protection or detoxification biomarkers (e.g., heat shock proteins, glutathione-S-transferase, metallothioneins), I evaluate stress within a bioenergetics framework. Specifically, I am interested in how contaminants affect energy production, regulation, and investment in organisms. By framing stress in a bioenergetics context, energetic stress can be examined and interpreted across multiples levels of organization- subcellular (e.g., ATP regulation), organismal (e.g., metabolic capacity), behavioral (e.g., movement), and population (e.g., reproductive success). In previous studies, I investigated energetic stress in marine and freshwater invertebrates exposed to individual pollutants (i.e., triclosan) and municipal wastewater effluent. Here at OSU, I am using birds and reptiles to investigate the energetic consequences of exposure to crude oil.