Sascha Hooker

Sascha Hooker is a Reader in Marine Ecology at the Sea Mammal Research Unit at the University of St Andrews, UK. Sascha has been involved in research on the ecology and conservation of marine mammals since 1993. She completed her undergraduate research in Zoology with Anthropology at the University of Oxford, then did her PhD research at Dalhousie University, Canada, where she studied the foraging ecology of northern bottlenose whales in eastern Canada, completing this in 1999.  She held a post-doctoral fellowship at the British Antarctic Survey working on Antarctic fur seal foraging in South Georgia, and a UK Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship (2003-2010) at the University of St Andrews working more generally on marine mammal foraging strategies.  In 2004, she obtained a lectureship at the University of St Andrews (to begin upon completion of her fellowship, although she delayed this slightly spending a year as a visiting researcher at the University of La Rochelle).  She has reduced her hours to a half-time position since 2004 when she had the first of her three children.  She has three main areas of research: the interaction between marine mammal behaviour and the surrounding environment, the physiological mechanisms underpinning diving behavior, and the application of these to conservation planning in the ocean.  She has had a long interest in biologging instrumentation, from the trials of trying to attach TDRs to northern bottlenose whales, to the tribulations of using prototype oceanographic and digital camera tags on Antarctic fur seals.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Email address: [email protected]

For more information and details on Sascha’s publications see her page on the University of St Andrews research portal.