I am a quantitative research associate working with the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland Maine. I work in the Integrated Systems Ecology Lab led by Dr. Kathy Mills focusing on the distillation of climate and fisheries data to understand how the rapid and projected warming affects the ecosystem, fisheries, and coastal communities. I also track and visualize the sea surface temperature trends in the Gulf of Maine.
I work primarily in R, but I prefer python for some of my current projects involving large multi-dimensional arrays like CMIP model scenarios. I enjoy using data science tools like shiny and quarto to tell the stories of data around fisheries and climate change. I see a lot of value in giving the audience an opportunity to explore their own questions with the available information, as I believe it fosters a better understanding of the complex interactions at play.
I'm currently researching community size-structure changes in the Northeast US groundfish community which is sampled by Federal fisheries-independent surveys. This region is experiencing rapid warming and is used as a natural experiment for the impacts of global warming on marine species.
I am also currently working on zooplankton community analyses using the Continuous Plankton Recorder CPR datasets for the Gulf of Maine and Mid-Atlantic Bight regions. This work relates remotely sensed data products like NOAA's OISST dataset in addition to the NERACOOS Buoy Array to relate zooplankton timeseries patterns to physical drivers.
Lastly I am involved in designing the data processing pipelines for some of our climate model ensemble projections, which are used to forecast species-distribution change in the NE US and Scotian Shelf habitats.
My research interests are in modeling how a changing marine environment impacts habitat use and community compositions across the world's oceans. I really enjoy the opportunity to explore these questions, and the challenges and nuance that they bring with them.