Coastal & Marine Conservation

Tanner Waters (he/him) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. His graduate research focuses on using the emerging technique of environmental DNA metabarcoding to assess the impact of coastal...

Timnit Kefela is an environmental scientist, organizer and educator who seeks to better understand (micro)plastic pathways, fates and impacts in effort to inform and design liberatory infrastructural solutions for pollution mitigation and...

Hannah Mittelstaedt is pursuing a Ph.D. in Ecology and Environmental Sciences at the University of Maine. Her research is focused on discerning how anthropogenic and environmental pressures change coastal ecosystems by assessing the effects...

Kelly Luis received her PhD in Marine Science & Technology at the University of Massachusetts-Boston (UMB). Her research focuses on developing remote sensing algorithms to understand the impacts of climate change and anthropogenic...

Brittani R. Orona is an enrolled member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe and received her Ph.D. in Native American Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Human Rights at UC Davis in Spring 2022. She is currently an Assistant Professor of American...

Melissa Cronin is a Smith Conservation Research Fellow and postdoctoral researcher hosted by the Coasts and Commons Co-Laboratory at Duke University. She is an interdisciplinary marine conservation scientist and studies the impacts of industrial fishing on ecosystems, threatened species, and human communities. She is co-founder of the conservation organization Mobula Conservation (www.mobulaconservation.org) and co-founder and CEO of FieldFutures (www.fieldfutures.org).

Originally from Massachusetts, Katey graduated from Brown University in 2012 with a BS in Geo-Biology. She always had a passion for conducting science that produces tangible outcomes to support knowledge that communities have of the state...

Erik Grijalva completed his PhD in restoration ecology at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), where his research revolved around understanding restoration and conservation approaches within highly modified ecosystems. His...

Natalya Gallo is a PhD candidate in biological oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD and is an NSF graduate research fellow and a fellow of the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation. Her dissertation...