I received my B.S. in Biology from the University of Puget Sound in Washington and my Masters of Philosophy in Sea Turtle Biology from the University of the West Indies.  My career studying sea turtles began in Barbados, where I spent 6 years participating in the conservation efforts of nesting hawksbills and leatherbacks and foraging hawksbills and greens.  My work with community-based conservation programs continued while working as the Deputy Program Manager/Senior Biologist for the Sea Turtle Conservation Program a the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, FL.  I enjoy engaging communities through education and hands-on participation in field research.

At the marine lab my responsibilities have ranged from coordinating and conducting marine mammal and sea turtle surveys to budget development and oversight, as well as grant coordination and reporting for several funded projects.

I’m interested in several aspects of marine conservation, but most particularly the habitat use and populations dynamics of cetaceans, and applying spatial analyses in our research.  After growing up in Minnesota and studying at Boston University, I held a variety of seasonal field jobs researching right whales in their critical habitats before working for Duke.

At Duke, I am involved in a variety of projects as a research technician here, which fortunately means a lot of field work.  I help conduct aerial and vessel surveys offshore at proposed sites along the southeastern seaboard for the US Navy’s proposed Undersea Warfare Training Range (USWTR).  Our goal is to provide the Navy with baseline data of the marine mammal and sea turtle density and abundance estimates in these areas.  We accomplish this though a variety of methods, including photo-identification, passive acoustic monitoring, and biopsy sampling.  I also assist in other field projects at the lab, including coastal surveys and help with data management.

I am interested in bioacoustics and animal behavior, specifically the behavior and communication systems of marine mammals and using passive acoustics to gain temporal and spatial knowledge of marine mammal occurrence.  I received my Master’s degree from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and my Ph.D. from Duke University.  For my Master’s work, I studied manatee vocalizations and behavior.  For my Ph.D., I used passive acoustics to look at how cetacean vocal events varied temporally and spatially in Onslow Bay, NC.  I also looked at species-specificity in odontocete whistles and clicks. I am currently employed as a Postdoctoral Associate at Duke, where I am in charge of the deployment and analysis of High-frequency Acoustic Recording Packages (HARPs, Scripps) in areas off NC and FL.

I am interested in understanding how variability in the marine environment, driven by currents, tides, and ocean fronts, determine the distributions and behaviors of marine animals. I use a variety of bio-acoustic techniques along with physical oceanographic data methods to observe and enumerate the relationship between the environment and marine animals, and I am interested in incorporating my research into management practices to help protect culturally or economically important species of fish and marine mammals.

My current focus as a postdoc in the lab is on understanding the dynamics influencing pilot whale prey layers at the shelf break. Prior to coming to Duke, I got my PhD from Oregon State University, where I studied the ecology of small pelagic fish in the California Current System, and my Master’s degree from Texas A&M University, where I investigated deep scattering layers in the Gulf of Mexico.

I earned a B.Sc. and M.Sc. degree in marine biology from the University of North Carolina Wilmington where I studied lipid metabolic dynamics in North Atlantic right whales.  I’ve spent many summers in the Bay of Fundy working on a number of field based research projects, ranging from seabird and shark foraging ecology to right whale photo-identification and habitat use studies.  I’ve also worked in the Southeast United States right whale calving grounds as a research observer helping to reduce ship collisions with right whales.

Currently, I’m working on several projects in the lab but I am primarily responsible for conducting marine mammal and sea turtle surveys in the proposed Navy Undersea Warfare Training Ranges (USWTR) in Onslow Bay and off Jacksonville, FL.  The aim of this project is to provide the Navy with baseline data on the occurrence, density and residency patterns of marine mammals and sea turtles in the USWTR.

I am interested in the behavioral ecology of marine mammals, especially  foraging ecology, habitat use, and fisheries interactions. I received my Master’s in Marine Sciences from the University of California at Santa Cruz and studied seasonal differences in activity budgets of bottlenose dolphins in Sarasota, Florida.

My fieldwork at Duke consists of photo-identifying bottlenose dolphins, collecting data on dolphin and whale activity, and trawling for fish and invertebrates.

I have participated in a number of interesting projects, several of them focusing on the interactions between marine animals and commercial fisheries. Previously, we completed a study that used an overhead video system to look at how dolphins behave around gillnets in order to understand why dolphins sometimes become entangled in this gear.