Ocean Ecology Laboratory

I am an ecologist and bioacoustician with a focus on conserving wildlife populations to strengthen ecosystem resilience in the face of climate change. I am particularly interested in top predators and using flexible models and machine learning to uncover patterns in big data. As a postdoc at OSU, my research focuses on the distribution and residency patterns of endangered southern resident killer whales and overlap with prey resources and human activity. For my PhD, I studied the seasonal distribution and residency, calling rates, and year-round acoustic abundance of fish-eating and mammal-eating killer whales in the Gulf of Alaska. I have also studied the economic impacts of proposed management policies to reduce entanglements of critically endangered North Atlantic right whales, as well as novel fishing technologies. I emphasize applied research to inform conservation and management policy.