Interest in ethnobotany, the study of people’s relationship with plants, was the beginning of my circuitous road to becoming a PhD student in URI’s Dept of Marine Affairs.
After my BS at the University of Washington, I spent long hours as a fisheries observer in the Bering Sea talking to fishers whose perspectives did not necessarily square with what I thought I knew as a biologist. There, an interest in marine policy began.
On the way to URI, I completed MS in Botany at the University of Hawai’i-Mānoa researching
Limu malihini,
an invasive microalgae. I’ve worked on freshwater HABs for Connecticut, climate change impacts on aquaculture for NOAA Fisheries, algal biofuel development, and a long-running citizen-science project on the relationship between public health and fracking.
My current research efforts are focused on evaluating people’s perceptions of water quality in Narragansett Bay and beyond, as well as the very related micro and macro-phenomena of HABs as a social problem.
