New AgBioResearch faculty member
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EmailCheryl Murphy, assistant professor in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife and Lyman Briggs College, became affiliated with MSU AgBioResearch in January.
Cheryl Murphy, assistant professor in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife and Lyman Briggs College, became affiliated with MSU AgBioResearch in January. Her research focuses on how information translates across different organizational scales. Using fish as a model, she synthesizes information collected on individuals and uses it to answer questions at a higher organization level. Specifically, she examines how an individual’s physiological processes translate to behavioral changes and ecologically relevant endpoints; how short-term phenotypic changes in life history traits influence long-term genetic change; and how anthropogenic influences such as contaminants affect these relationships and fish populations or communities.
Murphy focuses on the sublethal effects of stressors on individual fish and how to translate these effects to a broader fish population. For example, prior research has primarily examined whether a stressor killed the fish. Murphy’s research focuses on the wounded fish and whether they function normally or if their reproduction and growth are impaired, and the implications of such impairments for an entire fish population.
Before coming to MSU in 2008, Murphy was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. She received her doctorate in ecological and physiological modeling and ecotoxicology at Louisiana State University in the Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences in 2006, her master’s degree in physiology and cell biology from the Department of Biology at the University of Alberta in 1998, and her honors bachelor’s degree in marine biology from Dalhousie University in 1993.
