CONSERVATION ECOLOGIST AND WRITER
I am a Smith Conservation Research Fellow and postdoctoral researcher hosted by the Coasts and Commons Co-Laboratory at Duke University and working in partnership with Global Fishing Watch and Conservation International. I received my Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UC Santa Cruz. Broadly, my research lies at the intersection of conservation and fisheries science. I am currently working on a project to understand the conservation and food security implications of large- and small-scale fisheries interactions.
I use interdisciplinary methods in the natural and social sciences, with a special focus on applied research with real-world conservation implications. My Ph.D. research focused on oceanic sharks and rays and employed genomics, policy analysis, and collaborative social science methods to investigate the impact of industrial fishing on sharks and mobula (manta and devil) rays. I am a co-founder and Project Leader of Mobula Conservation Project, an organization dedicated to the research and conservation of manta and devil rays in the Eastern Pacific Ocean.
I am the Executive Director of FieldFutures, a program that trains field scientists and teams to prevent gender-based harassment and assault in scientific fieldwork settings. FieldFutures has trained thousands of participants on five continents. As a precursor to FieldFutures, I co-founded the Building a Better Fieldwork Future Program, at UC Santa Cruz. I teach field biology and conservation with the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program at UC Santa Cruz, and host an annual event called Fish Tales: A Live Storytelling Event in Santa Cruz. Read more about these ongoing projects here.
I am fortunate to be a National Geographic Explorer, a Switzer Foundation Fellow, and a P.E.O. Scholar.
Previously, I was a journalist covering science, the environment, wildlife crime and trafficking, and politics. I am most interested in the intersection between fisheries systems and conservation — how do food systems impact threatened species with which they interact? How can we simultaneously support sustainable livelihoods and conservation goals? How do we coexist with animals without wiping them out?
My work has been featured in Slate, The New York Times, VICE, Salon, Grist, The Verge, Gawker, Narratively, Popular Science, Quartz, Motherboard, Orion Magazine, Discovery, The Nation, Catamaran Magazine, The Dodo, EarthTouch News and others. I was a Fellow at Grist Magazine, a Staff Writer at Gawker and The Dodo, and a freelance reporter.
In the (distant) past, I co-founded and was the fiction editor for Potluck Magazine, a literary journal that features fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and art. Check it out.
My work has been generously funded by the Cedar Tree Foundation, the National Science Foundation, National Geographic Society, the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation, the Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation, the Save Our Seas Foundation, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Phi Beta Kappa Northern California Association, P.E.O. International, the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, the UCSC PBSci Future Leaders in Coastal Sciences Award, the Western Division of the American Fisheries Society, UCSC Grad Lab, and the Myers Oceanographic & Marine Biology Trust Grant.
