I am a Foreign Affairs Specialist in the NOAA Fisheries Office of International Affairs, Trade, and Commerce.

Prior to assuming my current position, I was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Cooperative Institute for the Study of Climate, Ocean, and Ecosystem Studies where I collaborated with Dr. Lorenz Hauser and Dr. Ingrid Spies on a project focused on distributional shifts in Walleye Pollock. Prior to that, I was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University's Hatfield Marine Science Center. I worked with Dr. Scott Baker on a project to develop molecular methods to determine the age of beluga whales in the endangered Cook Inlet, Alaska, population. I am also a Fulbright Arctic Initiative Scholar studying distributional shifts in Arctic fish species. 

In 2017, I worked in the Office of International Affairs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as a Sea Grant Knauss Marine Policy Fellow. 

My Background: 

Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, I grew up by the mountains and the sea. The compelling landscape of Seattle instilled in me a deep love of the natural world. After a stop in Ohio at Oberlin College and Conservatory of Music where I earned a B.A. in Biology and B.Music in Cello Performance, I traveled farther East to Woods Hole.

My research as an undergraduate included one summer as an REU student at Mount Desert Island Biological Labs in Maine working with Dr. Andrew Christie on neuro-endorcrine regulation in green crabs, Carcinus maenas. I then spent two summers in Dr. Timothy Shank's lab at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI); the first as a guest student and the second as a summer student fellow. It was not my first time in Woods Hole, though. As a junior in high school, I attended a summer program at the Sea Education Association.

The year after I graduated from Oberlin, I applied for graduate schools and fellowships and spent some time in Madagascar. In the spring of 2010, I was accepted into graduate school, awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and learned that I'd been selected as a Fulbright Fellow all on the eve of traveling internationally for the first time. It was a good month.

I started the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography in September of 2010. After a year of leave in 2011 to pursue a Fulbright Fellowship in Wellington, New Zealand, I moved back to Woods Hole, MA, to complete my PhD.  In the Shank Lab, I was involved in ongoing deep-sea research as well as developing my own research on range expansion genomics. Check out this interview I did from the Mediterranean Sea during the summer of 2012.

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