I am a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington School of Aquatic and Fisheries Sciences. I study the effects of environmental stress on tropical reef-building coral physiology, reproduction, and recruitment. Increased frequency and severity of marine heat waves is causing coral bleaching – the breakdown of the nutritional symbiosis between tropical reef-building corals and their algal endosymbionts. My work focuses on understanding the influence of the environment on the formation and stability of this nutritional symbiosis between corals and their algal symbionts during early development in multiple species in Hawaiʻi, USA and Moʻorea, French Polynesia. In this research, I utilize metabolomic, transcriptomic, microbiome, and physiological datasets combined with multi-omic analyses to characterize shifts in coral symbiosis under stress and provide data to inform reef conservation efforts. 

I obtained my PhD at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology studying reproductive biology in corals. Seeing a need for scientists to also be translators and educators, I conducted research in science education to understand how participation in research influences student science identity. I use online notebooks and GitHub to publicly share my data and analyses, which can be found here.