I work with seabirds most people will never see, on islands most people will never visit, and I care about them probably more than is reasonable.

I’m a wildlife ecologist and conservationist with a long-standing fascination (fine, obsession) with procellariiforms - the ocean’s most elusive, long-lived, burrow-nesting seabirds. I’m currently a PhD candidate at Northern Illinois University in Dr. Holly Jones’s Evidence-based Restoration Lab, where my research is rooted in a very practical question: what’s actually stopping us from saving these species? and how do we fix it? My work focuses on two of the most threatened seabirds in the Pacific: the Rapa Shearwater and the Polynesian Storm-petrel, and tackles one of the biggest barriers in conservation: we often don’t have the detailed life-history data needed to intervene with confidence. So I spend my time finding that missing information, tracking chicks from hatch to fledging, documenting how they grow, and building predictive tools that help conservation teams understand, in real time, whether a bird is thriving or needs help. The goal is simple: turn uncertainty into action. By translating field data into practical tools and protocols, my research directly supports monitoring, chick-rearing, translocation, and future restoration—including efforts to return species to places they’ve already disappeared from.

I grew up in Wyoming—landlocked, windswept, and about as far from seabirds as you can get—but found my way to the ocean while earning my Biology degree with a Marine Biology emphasis at BYU–Hawaii in Laie. Since then, I’ve built my career in hands-on conservation, working with species that don’t have much room for error. From 2016 to 2022, I worked with Pacific Rim Conservation’s Translocation Team, later serving as their Animal Care Coordinator, where I helped translocate, rear, and release over 600 seabird chicks. That includes Laysan and Black-footed Albatross, Bonin and Hawaiian Petrels, Tristram’s Storm-Petrel, and Newell’s Shearwater, each one a small, loud, slightly chaotic investment in the future of its species. That work has taken me across the globe: rearing Black-footed Albatross with GECI on Isla Guadalupe, supporting African Penguin rehabilitation with SANCCOB in Cape Town, and contributing to Mariana Crow recovery with the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance on Rota. Most recently, I was recruited by SOP Manu to develop the methods and lead the artificial incubation and hand-rearing of the Fatu Hiva and Tahitian Monarch chicks, with the goal to develop a captive-breeding program for these critically endangered species.

Along the way, I’ve learned that I do my best work in remote places, with incredible teams, solving complicated problems that actually matter. At the end of the day, I’m here to make conservation more effective by figuring out what’s missing, building what’s needed, and making sure it gets used.