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Where I Come From and Other Personal Details.... |
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Suzie in Bermuda!
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My mother who originally hails from
El Salvador and my
father who is from Oklahoma happily raised my sister and me in sunny San Diego!
San Diego is a wonderful city full of delicious Mexican food, perfect
weather, very healthy/thin people, and great white sharks! Growing
up in San Diego, I fell in love with the ocean and all of its amazing
creatures....be they algal or vertebrate! My life's passion is to
try and understand the world beneath the water and help in finding a way
to manage our world's oceans.
I loved San Diego so much that I chose to stay there for my college years. I graduated from San Diego State University with a B.S. in Biology and a minor in Political Science. During my years at S.D.S.U., I had an incredible job as a fish and wildlife scientific aide for the California Department of Fish and Game Marine Resources Division. After two years at CDFG, I received an undergraduate fellowship that allowed me to pursue research while paying me a stipend and my tuition! With this opportunity, I worked on a fascinating sea turtle foraging project in Dr. Susan Williams' marine ecology lab. When I wasn't chasing down sea turtles in San Diego Bay, I was spending the summer as an intern at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, MD or the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA. After departing San Diego with my degree, I started a Ph.D. at The College of William and Mary Virginia Institute of Marine Science. I spent two years with Dr. Mark Patterson in his Physical Biology laboratory. Mark is a brilliant scientist that co-created an autonomous underwater vehicle that he has used to take metabolic readings from coral reefs and use sidescan sonar to track fish. Spending two years working for Mark was an incredible experience! He encouraged me to take a course in Coral Reef Ecology at the Bermuda Biological Station for Research. He taught me how to build circuit boards and allowed me to participate in writing a NSF grant. As his student, I was awarded a National Institute of Health Minority Access to Research Careers Predoctoral Fellowship! My second summer at VIMS sent me to the University of Washington's Friday Harbor Laboratory. Ten weeks at FHL lured me away from physical biology and sparked my interest in molecular ecology! After two and a half years in Gloucester Point, VA, I decided to pack my dog and myself into a U-Haul and head west. I decided to forge a new path and integrate my ecology and physical biology training with the wonderful world of molecules and evolution. As a graduate student in the University of Washington's Biology Department, I have used my varied research experiences to develop a multi-disciplinary dissertation project studying pacific salmon. |
