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 fifth-year PhD student at UC Santa Barbara in the Burkepile lab. In my research I integrate a combination of field experimentation, lab work, and ecological modeling to understand how changing levels of biodiversity influence communities in both temperate and tropical nearshore systems.
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.
