Growing up in Upstate New York, the ocean was always something of a mystery to me. While studying biology at Le Moyne College, I worked as a field technician for the Onondaga Environmental Institute, monitoring the health of local waterways and conducting stock assessments of brook trout, bass, and carp. Following my undergrad, and with increased awareness of marine issues like overfishing and invasive species, I shifted my focus towards the marine environment. At the Cape Eleuthera Institute in The Bahamas, I assisted graduate researchers in a variety of work ranging from the physiology of stone crabs, to tracking spawning migrations bonefish. With all of these areas of study, the common theme was the impact these animals have on their environment, and the people who depend on them. For my M.S. at Memorial University of Newfoundland, I investigated the adaptive physiology of land crabs, a fascinating family of crustaceans that have evolved to live on land and only return to the sea to complete their life cycle. Despite their ecological and economic importance, virtually nothing is known of their ecology or basic life history My research interests are surrounding small-scale fisheries and investigating how people interface with natural world.