Dr. Zair Burris is a marine and estuarine biologist who has studied a variety of organisms in the lab and field, including sea spiders, copepods, deep sea clams and tube worms, and estuarine fish. As an environmental scientist, she analyzed how characteristics of fish (diet, age, size, and sex) differ as a function of environmental parameters (month, location, water year-type) in the San Francisco Estuary. Her dissertation discovered that estuarine copepods are very selective when it comes to choosing a mate, and that some males mate disproportionately more than others. She has studied the negative effects of epibionts on the fitness of copepods, finding that females are often more heavily infested than males, and infested females have shorter lives and produced fewer eggs than females without epibionts. Her Master’s work focused on the costs associated with male parental care in sea spiders and determined that males carrying eggs are more likely to be covered in epibionts and preyed upon by fish than nonbrooding males. She has used Scanning Electron Microscopy to study larval development in sea spiders, flow cytometry to count phytoplankton, and taken a deep-sea submersible a mile down to study cold methane seeps. In her spare time, she is the executive director of a nonprofit that helps families in need. She received her Ph.D. in Biological Oceanography from the University of Connecticut, her M.S. in Biology from the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology, and her B.A. in Mathematics and French from Grinnell College.