About

I am currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI), and I seek to understand how the timing of life cycle events interacts with environmental variability and climate change to mediate dispersal, connectivity, and composition of coastal and nearshore marine communities. I first became interested in scientific research through geology courses at Smith College and summer internships in marine ecology at UMass Boston and the Downeast Institute (DEI). I completed a B.A. in Geoscience in 2016 with a minor in marine biology, and after graduating I returned to DEI to work as a research assistant. In 2017, I undertook a Fulbright Fellowship at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Bocas del Toro, Panama, where I quantified the impacts of seasonal hypoxia on holo- and mero-planktonic communities. I continued sample processing and data analysis through 2018, while also working part-time as a high school math and science tutor. I spent 2019-2024 as a PhD student at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science. In January 2025, I received my PhD in Biological Oceanography, and afterwards I stayed on at WHOI as a Postdoctoral Investigator. In late 2025, I returned to teaching and worked as an Adjunct Professor in Chemistry at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, where I ran fall semester General Chemistry labs. In 2026, I moved to Germany and joined the Food Webs working group at AWI, where we examine how planktonic communities respond to long- and short-term changes in their environment.

Throughout these experiences, I have participated in geology and marine biology research programs in the United States (Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island, and California), northeast Canada, New Zealand, Panama, and Germany, and I have worked with adults and/or larvae of taxonomic groups including bivalves, barnacles, echinoderms, gastropods, crabs, shrimp, and parasitic isopods.

I am also working with Kharis Schrage (fellow Joint Program graduate student and larval enthusiast) to revive the International Larval Biology Symposium, a semi-regular academic conference focused on all things larvae. See our latest efforts here!