In the past fifteen years, I held scientific positions in academia and the federal government to study coral reefs in the western Caribbean and southeastern Pacific. At the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, I restored natural populations of the endangered coral species Acropora cervicornis by growing fragments into complex branching colonies and transplanting them back to the reef environment. In the laboratory, I analyzed survivorship and growth rates of the corals, Porites astreoides and Siderastrea siderea, in response to enriched particulate organic matter; our results showed that corals exposed to nutrient-enriched sediments were able to offset the negative impacts of sedimentation by assimilating nutrients.

As a Biologist for the US Geological Survey in St. John, US Virgin Islands, I showed that corals of the species Diploria labyrinthiformis that were thriving in shaded microhabitats created by the mangrove tree canopy experienced less mortality than those in unshaded habitats following a high-temperature induced bleaching event. I continued to pursue coral reef research between 2014 and 2017 in Rapa Nui while working for the research group, Ecology and Sustainable Management of Oceanic Islands, whose main goal was to provide the scientific basis needed to strengthen the strategies of sustainable management and conservation of the marine biodiversity of Rapa Nui. I also attended a few graduate courses in theoretical and applied ecology at the Universidad Católica del Norte (Coquimbo, Chile) to formalize my interest in spatial patterns of ecological communities.

As a visiting scholar in the laboratory of Dr. Stuart Sandin at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, I was trained in the custom visualization and analysis software, Viscore, that uses three-dimensional models to extract spatially explicit data of coral reefs around the world. Currently, I am examining the variation of population structure and spatial patterning of the corals, Porites lobata and Pocillopora spp., along a wave energy gradients at Rapa Nui. I hypothesize that differences in growth and reproductive strategies, coupled with a gradient in wave energy, may in part explain differences in the spatial dispersion of the coral taxa along environmental gradients. I suspect that Porites lobata is a species with low fecundity and slow growth, defined as K-selected or climax species, and Pocillopora spp. is a species with high fecundity and fast growth, defined as r-selected or fugitive taxa. The power to detect and quantify fine-scale growth, mortality, and recruitment of coral colonies before environmental perturbations occur will allow stakeholders to make timely and informed decisions regarding the management of these natural resources. My project will provide baselines for monitoring population dynamics in ecological time.