Biography

I am a biological oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography. I build ecosystem models, and the partnerships around them, that help coastal communities make decisions in a changing ocean. My research asks how climate change and human activity reshape marine food webs, and how that knowledge can reach decision makers in time to matter.

My newest work uses agentic AI to break a major bottleneck in marine ecosystem-based management. Building a model by hand can take months or years, which keeps model-based advice out of reach for many places, including under-resourced regions. My group applies AI across the modeling lifecycle, from data assembly to calibration and scenarios, and every AI-generated step is documented and checkable.

I also direct the GSO Weekly Fish Trawl, a fish time series of roughly 60 years that ranks among the longest in the world.

Tying this work together, I coined the term Transdisciplinary Oceanography. It draws on every branch of oceanography and treats local, traditional, and Indigenous knowledge and lived experience as expertise alongside academic science.

My mentoring approach is trauma-informed and team-based, and it trains scientists to work in this transdisciplinary space, across disciplines and alongside communities historically left out of decisions. My ultimate goal is that the scientists I train take this approach into every community and discipline where they work.