Clare is a 1st year Ph.D. student in the Olo Be Taloha Lab at Penn State. She received her BA in Ecology from Rice University in 2016. During her time at Rice, Clare switched her focus to archaeology and attended field school in Songo Mnara where she became interested in pursuing historical ecology questions regarding past human marine resource use. After graduating, Clare spent time working as an ecological consultant looking at the current human impact on the grasslands of central California. She then returned to archaeology by working as a lab assistant in the Bear Bones Lab at UC Berkeley. Clare’s current interests are heavily influenced by her early training as a marine ecologist. She is focused on learning more about how humans have used marine resources over time, and how this use might affect the ecology of marine landscapes in the present. Specifically, Clare will be researching Swahili use of coral as a building material along the east African coast and how this has affected the marine ecology of the region and what lasting impacts coral harvesting practices may have had. Clare is an avid SCUBA diver and loves to be in the water any chance she can get. You can find her hiking, collecting bones for her reference collection, and spending time with her partner and their dog on her days off.
