Bio

Verena Tunnicliffe

Professor, Canada Research Chair (Deep Oceans Research) and Director of the VENUS Project at the University of Victoria.  Verena currently serves on the Advisory Committee for the Observing Oceans Initiative in the US.  Her research programme focuses on animal adaptations in extreme ocean environments. She has worked on mudflats, coral reefs, fjords, seamounts and deep-sea environments. Her work on hot vent communities has included an examination of how animal vent faunas around the world are related. Current work examines animal communities that survive on undersea volcanoes. She has also pursued interests in technological advances to improve deep ocean studies. She was the lead proponent for -- and now Project Director of -- the underwater cabled laboratory called VENUS that runs arrays of instruments on the seafloor near Victoria and Vancouver delivering live data on-line (www.venus.uvic.ca).