I'm a marine community ecologist interested in how anthropogenic changes are altering coastal ecosystems and what those changes mean for ecosystem stability. I completed my M.S. in the Silliman lab at Duke University and am currently a PhD candidate at UC Santa Barbara in the Burkepile lab, where I am an NSF-GRFP and UC Chancellor's Fellow. In my research I integrate a combination of field experimentation, lab work, synthesis, and ecological modeling to understand how species interactions influence communities in both temperate and tropical nearshore systems.
I earned a B.S. in Environmental Science (minors: Marine Science, Arabic) from the University of Arizona, where I was a Flinn Scholar. At UA I studied arid ecosystem phenology with the National Phenology Network as a NASA Space Grant intern and examined how the phenology of a keystone cactus could be affected by a changing climate. Outside of UA, I interned with a medley of marine conservation organizations (The Nature Conservancy, the South African Shark Conservancy, CORE Sea), conducted research on stable isotopes as a Summer Student Fellow at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and researched coral reef biodiversity as an intern at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. I love collaborating with other scientists and thinking broadly--during my PhD, I've been involved in a suite of different collaborative working groups and was part of the US Long Term Ecological Research program's inaugural cohort of Ecological Synthesis Fellows.
