Meet the lab
Melissa Cronin, PhD
Melissa is an Assistant Professor in the School for Marine Science and Technology at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. She is an interdisciplinary marine conservation scientist, writer, and equity practitioner dedicated to developing and implementing innovative solutions for nature and people, especially in fisheries settings.
She is co-founder of FieldFutures, an organization that trains people to prevent harassment and assault in scientific fieldwork, and Mobula Conservation, which leads scientific research and participatory conservation for manta and devil rays in the Eastern Pacific Ocean.
melissa.cronin@umassd.edu
Bella Garfield
Bella is a Master’s student in the Shared Seas Lab and has a B.S. in Marine Science from UC Santa Cruz. Her research background includes studying philopatry within northern elephant seal colonies, avian alarm calls in the Amazon Rainforest, and ecological soundscape analysis in the mid-Atlantic with NOAA's Passive Acoustic Branch. For her Master’s project, she will focus on mobulid bycatch interactions in Pacific tuna fisheries, aiming to understand the underlying drivers and evaluate mitigation techniques.
igarfield@umassd.edu