Nicole Phillips grew up watching documentaries of Jacques Cousteau exploring the sea and knew I wanted to be a marine biologist from the age of 9. As an undergraduate I spent a lot of time at the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Laboratories as a student as well as teaching and research assistant. My time and experiences there were very formative, especially working with Richard Strathmann who instilled in me a lifelong passion for larvae! I completed my PhD at the University of California Santa Barbara in 2002 under the supervision of Steve Gaines, them a postdoctoral fellowship at VUW funded by the US National Science Foundation, before joining the staff at VUW as a permanent staff member in 2006. I am also the Deputy Director of the Victoria University Coastal Ecology Laboratory (VUCEL).

The broad framework for my research is the population and community ecology of benthic marine organisms in coastal systems. I am generally interested in, and work across, several fields of research encompassing rocky reef/intertidal ecology, recruitment, larval ecology, and invertebrate biology, but also including coral reef and seagrass systems. My work has often focused primarily (although not exclusively) on the ecology of reproduction and early life-history stages (e.g. eggs, larvae, early juveniles) of marine invertebrates. Marine invertebrates are well known for their diverse reproductive and developmental strategies, and these strategies have consequences for the ecology of organisms through influences on population dynamics and patterns of dispersal and recruitment, while also underpinning our understanding of life history evolution. Early life stages are also particularly vulnerable to stress. For coastal marine organisms, anthropogenic drivers (e.g. climate change, sediment and pollutants from terrestrial run-off) may interact with each other and with natural drivers to affect organisms in unanticipated ways. I am especially interested in how factors or stresses that influence one life stage may have cryptic effects on subsequent life stages, as well as the potential interactive effects of multiple stressors