Dr. Vivienne Foroughirad joined the TAMUG Marine Biology Department and EEB program in 2024. Her current research is on the behavioral ecology of cetaceans, focusing on the factors shaping individual behavior and population-level social structures, and how these impact survival and reproduction across the lifespan. Much of her work comes from the long-term Shark Bay Dolphin Project in Australia, where she leverages multi-generational pedigrees of bottlenose dolphins to investigate mechanisms of inheritance of different behavioral phenotypes. She is additionally investigating how such long-lived, slow-reproducing species respond to climate change by examining the impact of marine heatwaves on dolphin behavior and reproduction.