About

SOCIAL SCIENCE FOR SUSTAINABLE OCEANS

I am a common-pool resource scholar using mixed social science methods (ethnography, surveys, interviews, observation, critical reflection) to study collective action for sustainability in small-scale fisheries. My work broadly examines how decentralization policies create new opportunities for small-scale fishers to organize, cooperate, and improve their wellbeing under ineffectual governments. I work with community-based organizations with longstanding relationships in the places I study. I take moral obligations very seriously towards my students, collaborators, and research participants.

ACADEMIC AFFILIATIONS

I am currently Assistant Research Faculty at UCSB where I lead an international team funded by an NSF DISES award, studying feedback loops and dynamic collective action around temporary fisheries closures.

From 2020-2022, I was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow under the Directorate of Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences. My postdoctoral research examined whether bottom-up and community-based governance lead to different patterns of compliance than top-down and state-led governance regimes in small-scale fisheries. I conducted this project at the Marine Science Institute at University of California Santa Barbara under the mentorship of Dr. Steve Gaines, head of UCSB’s Sustainable Fisheries Group and Dean of the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management.

In May 2020 I finished my PhD in the Coasts and Commons Co-Laboratory at Duke University Marine Lab, advised by Dr. Xavier Basurto, a student of Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom. My PhD examined a seeming success-story about collective action in rural Mexico sparked by a fisher-designed marine reserve policy (no-take zone or temporary fisheries closure).