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 fourth-year PhD student at UC Santa Barbara in the Burkepile lab. In my research I integrate a combination of field experimentation, molecular ecology, and ecological modeling to understand how changing levels of biodiversity influence communities in both temperate and tropical nearshore systems.
Making resources like code and protocols available to all makes science more equitable. As part of my desire to make science more transparent and accessible, I've created a distill website housed on GitHub where I post examples of my code, protocols, and an electronic version of my lab notebook. This addition was inspired by the Putnam Lab notebook, which you can fork here if you want to create your own (detailed instructions here). Click on the blue button below to check out my notebook and code.
I earned a B.S. in Environmental Science from the University of Arizona's Honors College with minors in Marine Science and Arabic. At UA I studied arid ecosystem phenology with the National Phenology Network 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.
