Koty Sharp received her B.A. in biology and anthropology from Mount Holyoke College in 1998 and her Ph.D. in marine biology from Scripps Institution of Oceanography (UC San Diego) in 2006. Her dissertation research focused on the microbial ecology and chemical ecology of symbioses in sponges and bryozoans. Koty has been a Marine Science Network (MSN) postdoctoral fellow based out of Fort Pierce since early 2006. In an effort to characterize the consistency of coral-bacterial symbioses across time and space, she has worked with larvae and gametes collected from several coral species on expeditions at Smithsonian MSN stations in Carrie Bow Cay, Belize and Bocas del Toro, Panama. She is also comparing results from those samples with others that she collects from corals in the Florida Keys. Her interests include marine microbial ecology, invertebrate-bacterial symbiosis, fluorescence microscopy applications, and marine natural product chemistry.