Principle investigator
Prof. Nadav Shashar – nadavsh@bgu.ac.il
Lab volunteer
Eng. Shlomo Taliansky – ruso1966@gmail.com
PhD students
Asa Oren – asaoren@gmail.com
2019 –
About Asa’s work: Many aquatic environments are under natural and anthropological influences, which cause damage to the various populations living in those environments such as fish, corals, echinoderm and invertebrates. The goal of my research is to use advanced technologies like 3D printing to shape the environment to support conservation and restoration of the damaged populations. 3D printing technology enable us to create artificial structures from various materials in shapes and colors suited to our purpose. The combination of 3D printing with advanced design tools we can create structure identical to natural structures or to create unnatural structures designed for our goals.
Dor Shefy – dorshefy@gmail.com
Co – supervised by Prof. Buki Rinkevich (IOLR)
2017 –
About Dor’s work: In the face of Global change, coral reef world-wide undergo sever degradation. It is projected that by next few decades more than 50% of the reef will disappear. While conservation acts solely are not enough, and the rate of change is too fast for the coral to adapt, it is necessary to think of a novel way. In the active reef restoration tenet (growing coral in nurseries and then transplant them to a degraded reef), transplanted population may face the same problems as a new population: relatively low population and genotypic size, low genetic variation and maladaptation to the change in environmental conditions. In my research I focus on coral reproduction, coral chimerism (the presence of 2 or more genotypes in a colony) and other coral interaction as restoration tool.