Biography

Rachel joined CRC in 2022 as a Postdoctoral Fellow jointly affiliated with CRC and the Humphries Lab. Her research focuses on quantifying the social and ecological impacts of distant water fishing fleets (DWFs) on national fishery resources and coastal communities. She is particularly interested in how DWFs impact food security for coastal populations around the world. More broadly, Rachel engages in interdisciplinary research to develop equitable and effective solutions to pressing issues facing the oceans and all of us who depend on them. In addition to her work on DWFs, her current research projects span the topics of small-scale fisheries health and resilience, marine spatial planning governance, and the evaluation of complex social-ecological outcomes.

Rachel earned her Ph.D. in 2018 from the University of California Santa Cruz with a dissertation on the ecology and human dimensions of California’s nearshore groundfish fishery. Prior to her graduate work, she served as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer in Fiji and worked in the coastal zone management program in Saipan, CNMI.