My Story

I grew up in a small rural town in New Hampshire and a lot of my childhood was spent in nature. My desire to protect the environment led to studying Biology at Smith College, but I still did not exactly know what I wanted to do with that degree until I had an “aha” moment while studying away from campus at the Williams-Mystic Maritime Studies Program. Finding myself interested in the commercial fishing fleet in Stonington, Connecticut I designed an independent research project where I sampled diet contents from fish caught in a commercial trawling vessel. I was completely enthralled by the marine life coming up in the trawl, the inherent destruction of trawling, and the incredible knowledge and generational wisdom of the fishermen. The biological coolness and the dichotomy of emotions ensnared me, and I haven’t looked back since.

After internships at the NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center, the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, and the New England Aquarium I moved to Alabama to work as a research technician in the Fisheries Ecology Lab at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab. After a year in Alabama I moved to Virginia to start my master’s degree in fisheries science at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science working with Dr. John Graves. I defended my MSc. in 2014 but was still not sure about a Ph.D. Instead, I moved to Miami to work as a technician at Florida International University and chase tiny fish around the Everglades in a helicopter and occasionally be chased by alligators.

In 2015 I began to feel the need to get back to pelagic fishes and I started my Ph.D. with Martin Grosell at the University of Miami. My dissertation research focused on the influences of anthropogenic stressors (crude oil) and environmental variables (temperature and light) on the physiology and behavior of marine fishes. In particular I conducted behavior and electro-olfactogram experiments with bicolor damselfish and mahi-mahi to better understand how exposure to crude oil affects behavior and olfaction and studied the effect of temperature and light on the migrations and behavior of wild mahi-mahi using pop-up satellite tags.

As a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Miami, I led a 16-day research cruise to the Gulf of Mexico as Chief Scientist and together with a team of researchers caught 50 mahi-mahi, tagged them with pop-up satellite tags, and exposed half of them to oil and half to control conditions in onboard tanks before releasing them back to the wild. The data from these tags are the first detailed look at how crude oil affects the behavior of wild fish in their natural environment.

In the fall of 2020 I began working as a postdoctoral researcher at East Carolina University’s Coastal Studies Institute investigating the role of climate change and environmental variation on the abundance and spatial distribution of pink, white, and brown shrimp in Pamlico Sound. These annual species are highly influenced by temperature, salinity, and wind stress during the recruitment period and are excellent bioclimatic indicators.

In the Spring semester of 2022 I took a hiatus from my postdoc to be a visiting assistant professor of Marine Ecology at the Williams-Mystic Program. Having the opportunity to teach where I first became inspired to become a marine scientist was extremely meaningful for me as a scientist and educator.

After returning to the Coastal Studies Institute as a postdoctoral researcher I started a project working on a collaborative and multidisciplinary approach to understanding environmental and climate drivers of North Carolina Fisheries.

In the summer of 2023 I started a new chapter and am now working as the fisheries liaison for Avangrid’s Kitty Hawk Wind project, an offshore wind project off of the North Carolina coast. As a fisheries liaison for the project my job is to serve as a marine policy and fisheries expert, to provide outreach and information to recreational and commercial fishers, and to develop a fisheries monitoring plan for the project.

One of my longstanding career interests is in mentoring students and early-career scientists when it comes to decisions around whether, or how, to pursue graduate education and guidance on how to approach career decisions. My intent in sharing my biography here is to demonstrate how I came to be a fisheries biologist and the many steps and choices (and moves) I have made in my career so far. The work that I have pursued throughout my career is oriented around core themes of cooperative research with fishermen, pursuing questions related to “what makes marine animals move/behave”, and using hands-on approaches to teaching and learning. At each step along the way, I have been consistently surprised at where I landed but happy to enjoy the adventure.