Welcome Sierra Gray
We are proud to announce that Sierra Gray is joining the NSA as our first ever Seasonal Education & Research Associate!
Sierra is a multi-year recipient of our NHS Alumni Scholarship for both her undergraduate and graduate studies. We believe in the value of investing in Nantucket students’ higher education in marine sciences and creating opportunities for them to bring their learnings home to share with our community. We look forward to sharing updates as we create educational events and resources with Sierra this season.
She earned a Bachelors of Science in Marine Biology with a minor in Wildlife Conservation Biology from the University of Rhode Island in 2021. She is currently finishing her thesis and completing her Masters of Science from the University of Victoria British Columbia. Upon her graduation, Sierra will be returning to Nantucket to join the NSA in this newly developed role.
We are incredibly proud of the work that Sierra has done. She was a principal investigator and organizer for an international collaboration project with DFO (Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada), NOAA- Northwest Fisheries Science Center (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and the Hakai Institute (Canada) focusing on the exchange of critical technical and scientific knowledge through workshops and discussions at each laboratory (Nanaimo, BC, Seattle, WA, and Quadra Island, BC.
She also helped facilitate technical cross-training, presentations on current research projects, and discussed potential synergistic and coordinated experiments among the research institutions. She completed a two-month laboratory experiment as lead investigator examining the effects of ocean acidification in an integrated multi-trophic aquaculture setting using juvenile Pacific oysters, giant California sea cucumbers, and Sugar kelp. She also presented her MSc research at three conferences in 2023:
- 44th Annual Pacific Ecology and Evolution Conference in Vancouver, BC, Canada
- 5th International Symposium on Effects of Climate Change on the World’s Oceans in Bergen, Norway
- Aquaculture Association of Canada 2023 Conference in Victoria, BC, Canada
So far in 2024, Sierra was published for the first time as a co-author on a project she worked on titled: "Development of a nature-based solution for mitigation of Pacific oyster summer mortality: use of the intertidal zone to improve resilience to environmental stressors."
