Erica is a newly-minted doctor in the Aburto Lab, whose research focuses on climate-fishery interactions in coastal ecosystems. Prior to beginning her graduate studies atScripps Institution of Oceanography, Erica was trained as a marine ecologist at the University of California Santa Cruz, where she completed her B.S. in Marine Biology and a minor in Chemistry. At Scripps, her doctoral research has included a number of interdisciplinary projects, from quantifying the carbon footprint of important seafood
products in Baja California, to experimentally testing the effects of marine heatwaves on Mexican Mano de León scallops. This Fall, Erica will return to UC Santa Cruz as a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Kroeker Lab, where she plans to study the effects of climate change on commercially important taxa in the state of California. Long-term, Erica hopes to use her scientific training and body of work to educate people on the importance of protecting the ocean, and to contribute to socially-just environmental “solutions” for issues such as overfishing, biodiversity loss, and climate change.