The story
What started as a childhood habit of collecting tide-pool specimens turned into a career spent mostly underwater.
A life spent thirty feet from the water, and never really leaving it.
Diving began at fourteen, cataloguing the kelp beds nearby long before there was vocabulary to explain what was disappearing. That early attention became a doctorate in marine ecology, then a decade spent tracking the collapse and patchy recovery of kelp forests along the central coast.
The accompanying photographs — taken on the same dives as the fieldwork — have appeared in conservation reports and museum exhibits, used less as illustration than as evidence: a way of making a slow, underwater emergency visible to people who will never see it themselves.
Time is currently split between a research post at a coastal marine lab and independent fieldwork with community-led restoration groups, teaching the next generation of divers to read a reef properly.