Welcome!

I am an early career field researcher and data analyst in my final year as an MS candidate in the Biology Department at CSU Northridge. Current research focuses on the impact of natural environmental gradients (i.e. submarine groundwater discharge, SGD) on coastal coral reef biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. I aim to assess the relationship of species and functional trait diversity along an SGD gradient of two coral reefs in Mo’orea, French Polynesia, as well as understand the physiological effects of SGD on multiple benthic taxa and assemblages of varying species and functional identities in high and low SGD influence.

Previous work has focused on marine ecological shifts in response to climate change and restoration techniques of coral reef ecosystems. After receiving my BA in Marine Science from the University of San Diego in 2015, I spent three years in the Florida Keys working with local environmental organizations (i.e. Coral Restoration Foundation, Mote Marine Laboratory, and Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission). In these positions I helped monitor and restore threatened or damaged reefs, as well as study effects of climate change on those ecosystems. I began working at CSUN in 2018 as a Research Technician in Dr. Nyssa Silbiger’s Quantitative Ecology lab before being accepted as a graduate student into her lab in 2021.

As a technician and graduate student, I have worked primarily in R to develop protocols, training materials, and data processing scripts for lab equipment, a new mesocosm system, and standard procedures. I have also created an R package for cleaning, processing, and analyzing data from in situ environmental parameter loggers and other lab and field data collections, all still used by current lab members. I have worked in R Shiny to simplify processing and visualization of data from multiple Onset HOBO loggers (Conductivity-Temperature, pH, and Water Level). I am currently enrolled in a professional data analytics certification program, where I am gaining experience in SQL and Tableau to assist in my pursuit of ecological and environmental data analytics.