Holly Moeller, Ph.D.

Holly V. Moeller is a community ecologist and mathematical biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She is particularly interested in acquired metabolism — metabolic capabilities that, rather than being encoded within an organism’s DNA, are instead obtained within an organism’s lifetime from other species. Her research group uses a combination of field observations, laboratory experiments and mathematical models to develop and test new ecological theory. Holly’s interest in acquired metabolism stems from her undergraduate training at Rutgers University, where she worked with Paul Falkowski to study chloroplast-stealing ciliates. She received her master’s degree in 2010 from the MIT/WHOI Joint Program in Biological Oceanography, and her doctorate in 2015 from Stanford University. After attaining her Ph.D., she returned to WHOI as an NSF postdoctoral fellow working on mixotrophy. Before beginning her position at UCSB in 2017, Holly was briefly a Biodiversity Centre Research Fellow at the University of British Columbia. She is a Phycological Society of America Norma J. Lang Early Career Fellow.