After a year working as a lab technician, I began a PhD in Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley in 2017. With my PhD advisor, Seth Finnegan, I studied paleoecology, focusing on the Holocene—and, in particular, the Common Era, or the last 2,000 years—to investigate how climate change and human impacts affected seafloor ecosystems in California. I completed my doctoral dissertation, “Common Era records of Santa Barbara Basin benthic foraminifera reveal nineteenth and twentieth century shifts in reproductive life history, body size, and community structure” in December 2022. This research solidified my interest in understanding how socioecological systems changes—such as colonialism, industrialization, and urbanization—drive shifts in marine ecosystem structure and even impact individual life history determinations over rapid timescales.

This interest in social systems led to an orthogonal research track investigating the history of scientific racism and how it impacts STEM fields today. A major product of this work is a recent paper, “Systemic racial disparities in funding rates at the National Science Foundation,” led by my collaborator and friend Christine Yifeng Chen.

I am now a postdoctoral fellow with the Ulana ʻIke Center of Excellence at the University of Hawaiʻi Sea Grant College Program. My current position is funded through the Rising Voices, Changing Coasts: National Indigenous and Earth Sciences Convergence Hub, where I am applying my paleoecological training to building a regional understanding of historical climate and ecosystem cycles in Hawaiʻi using multiple knowledge sources, including ʻike Hawaiʻi.

Extension work

My work with Ulana ʻIke has deepened my training in reciprocal and place-based research practices. I joined Hawaiʻi Sea Grant and the Ulana ʻIke Center of Excellence as a remote graduate fellow in 2021, a position I held until the completion of my PhD. With Ulana ʻIke I found an avenue to expand on my extracurricular coursework in Indigenous Studies and my lived experiences as a Kanaka ʻŌiwi and Maʻohi scientist. As a graduate fellow I contributed to the second iteration of the Kūlana Noiʻi, a guidance document for developing reciprocal research relationships in places stewarded by Kanaka ʻŌiwi. As a postdoctoral fellow, I have extended my work on systemic racism in research funding to contribute to evaluating barriers to equitable funding and re-envisioning funding processes within Sea Grant, as well as investigating the extent of parachute research in Hawaiʻi and the sources of funding for this work.