How did Warner College prepare you for your career?
Warner College helped me see conservation as much more than an ecological challenge. It taught me to ask, Who is affected? Whose perspectives are being heard? What partnerships are needed? And how can we understand whether the work we are doing is actually making a difference?
The interdisciplinary courses and opportunities to engage across departments gave me a broader understanding of the complex social, ecological, and institutional dimensions of conservation. Programs such as the Center for Collaborative Conservation Fellowship were especially meaningful. They supported my graduate work while also connecting me with active conservation collaborations and practitioners working on real-world challenges. These experiences gave me practical insights into how conservation happens beyond the classroom and helped open doors to working with diverse communities, practitioners, and conservation organizations around the world.
That foundation continues to guide my career. Today, I work with communities and conservation organizations worldwide to incorporate human well-being considerations into program design and evaluation, develop more comprehensive ways to understand and measure conservation impact, support applied research, and help practitioners use evidence more effectively.
What I value most from my time at Warner is that it gave me both the technical foundation and the mindset to work across boundaries. My career has taken me into very different places and contexts, but the ability to listen, learn from different perspectives, build relationships, and connect research with practice has remained at the center of my work.
What advice would you give to current Warner College students?
I advise students to take advantage of every opportunity to connect with people, programs, and ideas across CSU. My own journey at Warner College actually started as an internship, which led to opportunities to collaborate with faculty and eventually helped open the door to my PhD.
I also encourage students to build relationships and stay curious. Get to know your professors, fellow students, practitioners, and people working in areas different from your own. Say yes to opportunities when you can, whether that is a fellowship, research project, field experience, internship, or collaboration. Some of the experiences that became most meaningful to me came from stepping outside my immediate program, meeting people from different disciplines, getting involved in new projects, and finding ways to connect what I was learning in class with real-world conservation work.
And don't feel like you need to have your whole career figured out. Give yourself room to explore, try different things, and follow the questions that interest you.