Julia Notar

Contact Information:

Room 307, Biological Sciences Building
Duke University
Durham, NC 27708
julia.notar@duke.edu

Website

Education:

BS, Marine Biology, UCLA (2009)
MS, Biology, UCLA (2016)
PhD, Biology, Duke University (2022)

Research Interests:

I study the visual ecology of marine invertebrates. I’m interested in animals with distributed sensory and visual systems – what can these animals see and what decisions do they make with the information they can gather from the environment? My research mostly focuses on sea urchins and their visually-guided behavior in a comparative context. While I primarily work with urchins, I am also interested in other echinoderms, marine invertebrates, and distributed and low-resolution visual systems more broadly.

Publications:

Notar, J. C., Meja, B., and S. Johnsen (2022). Testing Mechanisms of Vision: Sea Urchin Spine Density Does Not Correlate with Vision-Related Environmental Characteristics. Integrative and Comparative Biology.icac119, doi: 10.1093/icb/icac119.

Gordon, M.S. and Notar, J.C. (2015) Can systems biology help to separate evolutionary analogies (convergent homoplasies) from homologies? Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 117: 19-29. doi: 10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2015.01.005

Notar, J.C. and Gessow, J. (2009) Ecology of an intertidal leech: expanding the range of Malmiana buthi. Abstracts of the Annual Meeting of the Southern California Academy of Sciences. Bulletin of the Southern California Academy of Sciences 108: 112 doi: 10.3160/0038-3872-108.2.70