Lauren Bell
How Sound are Sitka Sound’s Seaweeds?
About the Speaker
Lauren Bell was raised on Alaska’s coastlines, with salt in her hair, sand in her toes, and a love of the ocean at her core. She left the state to attend college at Stanford University, where she studied the social behavior of Jumbo squid throughout her bachelors degree in biology. She then returned to Alaska to pursue her masters in marine biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, conducting research on Arctic marine food webs. During this period, she traveled to Sitka for the first time to attend Sitka WhaleFest where she immediately fell in love with the southeast Alaska community and its surrounding ecosystems. Lauren migrated to Sitka to work for the Sitka Sound Science Center as a research biologist in 2015, working on the development of a long-term monitoring program for pinto abalone in Sitka Sound. For the past 6 years she has been back in the classroom, pursuing her PhD through the University of California Santa Cruz. Her research investigates how high latitude seaweed will respond to climate change, and the consequences of these changes for the rest of the coastal food web. You can typically find her under the water, in the mountains with her husband and daughter, or cooking with locally harvested fish and seaweeds. She loves sharing in the wonder and discovery of the natural world, and she looks forward to WhaleFest every year. Lauren is thrilled to be joining SSSC as Research Director in summer 2023.