I grew up just down the road in Rancho Cucamonga where I was lucky enough to have easy access to the mountains, deserts, and beaches of Southern California and frequently visited these incredible places with my family. I have been enamored with the natural world from a young age and knew once I reached high school that I wanted to work in conservation. It wasn’t until I began attending Cal Poly San Luis Obispo for my undergraduate education that I discovered the fascinating world of plants and set my sights on a career in plant conservation. After changing my major so that I could better focus my coursework on botany, I received a Bachelor of Science in Biological Sciences from Cal Poly in 2023. My botanical work thus far has included several internships in the herbarium at Cal Poly, in Plant Records at The Huntington, in applied plant conservation right here at California Botanic Garden, and, most recently, I conducted field surveys for the National Park Service. I am excited to further my botanical education in the fascinating flora of California and beyond, and to conduct research that hopefully has an impact on plant conservation!
For my thesis research I will be studying Death Valley Sage (Salvia funerea M.E. Jones) which has a limited distribution and occurs in two disjunct areas in the Mojave Desert: in and just outside of Death Valley National Park in the north and in the Bristol, Ship, and Marble mountains about 80 miles away in San Bernardino County. I intend to conduct an integrative study that incorporates population genomics, species distribution modeling, and comparisons of morphological and anatomical characters to investigate population dynamics and identify possible differences between plants from the two disjunct regions of occurrence. I hope that my research outcomes can be used to inform future conservation actions for this rare desert species!
Header photo: Salvia funerea (Photographed by Steve Matson and available for use under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 3.0 (CC BY-NC 3.0) license)
