In 2015, I earned my Bachelor of Science degree in Wildlife (Conservation Biology/Applied Vertebrate Ecology) with a minor in English Writing from California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt.

In 2024, I earned my Master of Science degree in Biology from North Carolina State University under Drs. Jennifer Campbell and Emily Lynch, studying the impacts of diet and husbandry practices on red wolves in collaboration with the North Carolina Zoo. We published a paper about this research in the academic journal Animals, for which I earned first authorship: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/14/21/3121 You can find other scientific papers on which I’ve been a coauthor via my ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2343-0495

I am featured in Sy Montgomery and Nic Bishop’s beautiful nonfiction book The Hyena Scientist, available here. Read it to learn about spotted hyenas, zoologist Kay Holekamp, and the research we were doing in the Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya in 2016. For more information about the MSU Mara Hyena Project, check out their blog here. I wrote a few posts that can still be found in the archive.

I collected wolf howls in Yellowstone National Park for research that was published in a paper in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America:

Arik Kershenbaum, Jessica L. Owens, Sara Waller; Tracking cryptic animals using acoustic multilateration: A system for long-range wolf detection. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2019; 145 (3), 1619-1628. doi: 10.1121/1.5092973 https://asa.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1121/1.5092973