As the Moss Landing Museum student curator, I care for and catalog the collections and am developing education materials for visiting school groups and tours. Other collections I have cared for include the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Research Herbarium through an internship focused on cataloging and contextualizing it in the history of algal research in Monterey Bay and cataloging and enhancing the Restoration Ecology Laboratory’s Native and Invasive Species Reference Library at Colorado State University. I received my undergraduate degree in natural resource conservation and management and minor in anthropology from Colorado State University as well. Before coming to Moss Landing, I worked for the National Park Service on sea turtle ecology and at the Catalina Environmental Leadership Program (CELP) as an outdoor educator. As a student in the Phycology Lab at MLML, I am focusing my thesis on the mechanisms behind competitive interactions between giant brown kelp and an invasive species Sargassum horneri on Catalina Island.

The museum is open to any researcher that requires access to these specimens for research activities. We generally expect that you would first contact the museum curator via email: museum@mlml.calstate.edu. With permission from the MLML Director or other administrator the potential museum user would fill out a short entry form, and agree to some basic rules regarding use. We expect that most of the specimens would be examined at the MLML facility, and that sampling the specimens would be non-destructive, although we can make exceptions.