Kristin McCully Ph.D. student, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UC Santa Cruz
Kristin McCully volunteered as a Sea Ranger and summer docent and completed scientific research at the Aquarium while attending Palos Verdes Peninsula High School. During her bachelor degree studies at UCLA, she studied the diurnal rhythms of Tridacna clams in French Polynesia for UCLA’s Marine Biology Quarter and studied marine and tropical ecology for a semester at James Cook University in Australia, which hosts many of the most respected coral reef ecologists in the world. She also completed a senior thesis on the densities of introduced Pacific oysters (Crassostrea gigas) in the Port of Los Angeles. She is now continuing her Ph.D. work with UC Santa Cruz on coral reef ecology at Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge in the newly established Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument with a National Defense Science and Engineering Fellowship from the Department of Defense.