Erica Head received her MSc degree in 1975 from Queen Mary College, at the University of London, where she studied pigments in deep-sea jellyfish. She received her PhD degree in 1979 from the University College of North Wales at Bangor, where she studied intermediary metabolism in marine bivalve mollusks.
Erica came to Canada in 1980 to work at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography and has been there ever since. During her time there she has investigated the use of biochemical (digestive enzymes) and chemical (phytoplankton pigments) markers to measure feeding activity in zooplankton. She has also been involved in studies using phytoplankton pigment analysis in bio-optical and taxonomic applications.
More recently she has been involved in designing and running departmental monitoring programs on the Scotian Shelf and in the Labrador Sea. As well, she is involved in synthesis and analysis of results, and in examining how inter-annual climate variability affects the ecology of the plankton, with the overall aim of predicting the response of the ecosystem to long-term climate change. Due to its dominance in the systems that she studies, Erica has become an expert on the ecology of the copepod Calanus finmarchicus.
