Jessica
grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico where she developed
a
fascination with the big faraway foreign thing called
the ocean. She
got her undergraduate degree at University of California,
Santa Cruz,
with a major in marine biology and a minor in psychology.
While at
UCSC Jessica worked with the marine mammal physiology
project at Long
Marine Lab, where she worked closely with bottlenose
dolphins,
California sea lions, and Southern sea otters and became
interested in
marine mammal conservation issues. After graduating,
Jessica moved to
Hawaii where she worked for NOAA’s Hawaiian monk
seal research
program. She spent five summer field seasons in the
Northwestern
Hawaiian Islands studying the Hawaiian monk seal in
an effort to
understand the threats to this highly endangered species.
Jessica
is now working on her master’s degree at Hawaii
Pacific
University. Her project involves studying contaminants
in Hawaiian
monk seal tissue from the Main Hawaiian Islands, is
the only area in
which the Hawaiian monk seal population is not in decline.
However it
is also an area with the potential for a high amount
of environmental
contamination which could have a direct impact on the
reproductive
potential and immune response of the seals.
Jessica
was awarded a NOAA Nancy Foster fellowship to complete
her thesis project. She will be analyzing contaminants
in the Hawaiian monk seal population from the Main Hawaiian
Islands in relation to life-history traits of the seals
and geographic patterns of contamination to identify
specific risk factors to this important Hawaiian monk
seal population.
Jessica
enjoys playing volleyball, music, and surfing in her
free
time. She loves living in Hawaii and would like to continue
pursuing a
career in conservation research with an emphasis on
endangered
species.
