Cziko is a Research Marine Biologist in the Marine Spatial Ecology Division and the on-site Laboratory Steward for the Kasitsna Bay Laboratory. His work focuses on coastal marine processes including harmful algal blooms (HABs), coastal resilience, oceanography, and the ecology and restoration of habitats and biological resources.
Cziko is a fish physiologist and evolutionary biologist by training. Before relocating to semi-remote Seldovia, Alaska in 2023, Cziko participated in or led nine multi-month field research expeditions to Antarctica from 2002 to 2018. He has logged nearly 200 SCUBA dives under sea ice in Antarctica. As a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Oregon, he led a three-year National Science Foundation-funded project to study the freezing avoidance strategies of Antarctic fishes, which included the installation of the first live-streaming oceanographic observatory and camera under the sea ice of McMurdo Sound, Antarctica. Cziko has also worked as an Adjunct Instructor at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology, and as a consultant on small cabled oceanographic observatory systems worldwide. Cziko has published research on cold adaptation and freezing avoidance in fishes and invertebrates, the evolution of steroid hormone receptors, as well as the bioacoustics of marine mammals.
Cziko received his Bachelor of Science degrees in Biology and Biochemistry from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2004 and his Doctor of Philosophy in Evolutionary Biology from the University of Oregon, Eugene in 2014.