Mentoring Experience

One of my favorite parts of my academic career has been mentoring undergraduate, Master's, and PhD students. While in graduate school, I was the official PhD mentor for three Master's students, and have since served on three more committees, both at Scripps and SDSU. For one student's project, I helped her develop an iPhone app that mapped and monitored deep-sea marine debris. During my postdoc, I was the Committee Chair for one Master's student's thesis committee, and helped her develop NGSS-aligned marine debris curriculum for educational sailing vessels. I also mentored three REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) students over the summers and had four additional undergraduate employees. This one-on-one mentoring required me to manage their daily work, teach them multiple scientific skills, and let me pass on the good advice I received in my academic career to the next generation of scientists.

I also currently advise a PhD student at Scripps on an interdisciplinary project called The Penguano Project, examining penguin guano samples from Antarctica for their diet composition and the amount of microplastics they consume through the marine food web.

Pictured above are some of the graduate student members of Penguano and me.