I earned my undergraduate degree, a B.S. in Animal Biology, at the University of California, Davis, in 2006.  I initially planned to continue my education by attending vet school, and I worked at the UC Davis Vet Med Teaching Hospital for a year to get an idea of what my future would be like.  I thoroughly enjoyed my time at the vet hospital, but after being introduced to Marine Biology while studying abroad in Queensland, Australia, I fell in love with SCUBA diving, the ocean, and its inhabitants. 

I continued with more SCUBA training, eventually becoming a DiveMaster, and started volunteering to get practical experience doing marine biology fieldwork.  Especially memorable and valuable experiences include being a research diver for a Caribbean Wrasse project in the Florida Keys and an abalone study in Central California, and working as an intern at MOTE Marine Laboratories in Sarasota, FL, on a juvenile bottlenose dolphin behavior study during the summer of 2005.

I joined the Vertebrate Ecology Lab at Moss Landing Marine Labs shortly after my graduation from UC Davis in 2006.  Though I floundered a bit during my first year, having difficulty isolating one particular species that I wanted to study for my thesis, I am now well underway on a study addressing the effect of vessel disturbance on Pacific harbor seals (Phoca vitulina richardsi) in Glacier Bay, Alaska.

The harbor seal population of interest utilizes Johns Hopkins Inlet (JHI), a glacial fjord in the west arm of Glacier Bay National Park.  Although harbor seals are the most abundant marine mammals found in the park, the population has drastically declined since 1992 for reasons that remain largely unknown.  In hopes of explaining this decline in population numbers, I will be examining the role of vessel disturbance as a potential contributor. The objective of this study is to understand the nature and degree of vessel disturbance that occurs in JHI, and to determine the bioenergetic cost of said disturbance on individual seals, and the population as a whole.