Profile
Mindi Summers is a Ph.D. candidate in Marine Biology at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Her thesis uses phylogenetics to explore the diversity of crinoid echinoderms and the many animals that live with them. These associates include crabs, shrimps, clingfish, gastropods, brittlestars, and myzostome and scaleworm annelids—many of which ‘mimic’ specific featherstar hosts. Her undergraduate degree was in Geological and Environmental Sciences, with an honors thesis in coastal geophysics, from Stanford University. While a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, Mindi has also been involved in educational outreach that has engaged the public and local schools in her research. In 2010 she was the chief-scientist of an interdisciplinary student cruise that developed lesson plans and daily videos for classrooms and interacted with over 1500 students in San Diego and across the country. Mindi also worked with the Birch Aquarium in 2011 to create a ‘Name a Species’ program for six new species of worms that she and her lab are describing. This event solicited responses from over thirteen countries, with over 1000 votes on the final names. As part of her dissertation, she is now generating educational materials and is an editor for public databases as part of the Echinoderm Tree of Life project.
