Ai Nihongi

Biography

Dr. Ai Nihongi is a biology instructor at Milwaukee Area Technical College and an adjunct instructor at Carthage College and UW-Milwaukee. She was a research associate of the School of Freshwater Sciences from 2015-2020. Originally from Japan, Dr. Nihongi earned her bachelor's degree in marine biology from the Tokyo University of Fisheries, (now Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology), during which time she was selected to study as an exchange student at the University of Victoria, BC, Canada. While in Japan, Dr. Nihongi also became certified to teach high school biology and to be a curator for natural history museums, including aquariums. After four years of study in Japan and one year in Canada, she entered the PhD program in Biological Sciences at UWM to conduct research on the behaviors of planktonic crustaceans at UWM's Great Lakes WATER Institute. After earning her PhD from UWM, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Skidaway Institute of Oceanography in Savannah, Georgia, and then was hired by Discovery World in Milwaukee, to work as an associate scientist in aquatic biology at the educational, environmental, and cultural museum.

She led two successful EPA Great Lakes Restoration Initiative grants to develop the optical system to quantify and observe invasive species in ballast water. She has worked on the effect on zooplankton ecology of oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, as a member of the Dispersion Research on Oil Physics & Plankton Studies I and II (DROPPS I and II) Consortium funded by the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI). Most of her research has been conducted in collaboration with microbiologists, physicists, and mathematicians from other U.S. and international institutions.

Recent and Selected Publications

Uttieri, M., Nihongi, A., Hinow, P., Motschman, J., Jiang, H., Alcaraz, M., Strickler, J. 2019. Copepod manipulation of oil droplet size distribution. Scientific Reports 9:547 DOI:10.1038/s41598-018-37020-9 

Nihongi, A., Ziarek, J.J., Uttieri, M., Sandulli, R., Zambianchi, E. and Strickler, J.R. (2016) Behavioural interseasonal adaptations in Daphnia pulicaria (Crustacea: Cladocera) as induced by predation infochemicals. Aquat Ecol (2016) 50:667–684