Karen Wishner
American oceanographer
Karen Frances Wishner is an American oceanographer currently at University of Rhode Island and an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her interests include coastal shelf and zooplankton behavior and environment, and has published her findings.
Education and career
Wishner has a Bachelor of Arts degree in biology from the University of Chicago and as a sophomore participated in a field project in Costa Rica which sparked her interest in marine science. Wishner earned her Ph.D. in oceanography from the University of California, San Diego and Scripps Institution of Oceanography where she worked on the ecology of deep-sea plankton. During her dissertation research she collected plankton using nets attached to Deep Tow, the camera system designed by Fred Spiess. Wishner spent one term teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz after an invitation to do so from Mary Wilcox Silver, and then moved to the University of Rhode Island in 1980 where she was the first female tenure-track faculty hired by the Graduate School of Oceanography. She was promoted to professor in 1993. Wishner's teaching portfolio included a class that investigates right whales and what they eat, with an opportunity for field research conducted from the University of Rhode Island's research ship, the R/V Endeavor. As of 2021, Wishner is emerita professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island.
Research
Wishner is known for her research on zooplankton ecology and behavior, with a focus on copepods.
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