Biography

Mary received her undergraduate degree in Biology from UC Santa Barbara, where she was an underwater technician for PISCO conducting kelp forest monitoring in the Channel Islands. After graduating, she moved to Honolulu to work for NOAA Fisheries monitoring U.S. Pacific Coral Reefs. In 2009, Mary joined Alan Friedlander’s lab at the University of Hawai‘i as a MS student studying life history variation of coral reef fishes. After finishing her MS, Mary worked for IUCN as the lead analyst for the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network under the supervision of Dr. Jeremy Jackson and conducted a synthesis of coral reef status and trends in the Caribbean. In 2013, she enrolled in the PhD program at the University of Hawai‘i where she studied coral reef status, trends, and resilience in the Caribbean, as well as leading a compilation of coral reef monitoring data for Hawai‘i as part of the Ocean Tipping Points project. During and after my PhD, Mary has worked closely with the State of Hawai‘i on developing management guidelines for achieving the Sustainable Hawai‘i Initiative. In 2018, she joined the Burkepile lab as a postdoctoral researcher where she will be studying local and global drivers of coral bleaching. 

Research Area

Mary was a postdoctoral researcher from the lab from 2018-2020. Her postdoctoral research focused on interactions between local and global drivers of coral bleaching as part of a synthesis of global coral bleaching patterns. She is now an Assistant Professor at Arizona State University.