People

Natalie Storm – Field Technician

My role consists of supporting the long term northern elephant seal mark-recapture program at Año Nuevo Reserve. I frequently lead teams of undergraduate and graduate students to conduct flipper tag and mark resights of known-individual seals. I also help weigh and tag the young-of-the-year seals! In addition to supporting on-going research efforts, I am interested in reproductive trade-offs and strategies, such as intermittent breeding.

Conner Hale – Research Technician

I was a member of the first cohort of field assistants, and after graduating in 2022 I joined the lab in my current position. My role allows me to work with members of the lab in the field and office to support ongoing projects and contribute to research publications. Currently I am working on a manuscript about predator avoidance strategies in female northern elephant seals that I hope to submit later this year!

Hannah Jackson – Program Assistant

I joined the Beltran Lab in 2021 as an undergraduate field assistant and, after three field seasons, have transitioned to a program assistant role post-grad. I’m excited to support the long-term monitoring program of northern elephant seals, with research interests broadly in pinniped behavior and physiology.

Lina M. Arcila Hernández

As an evidence-based education researcher, I aim to understand and develop best teaching strategies that create inclusive field-based educational experiences and transformative pedagogical tools for all students.

Stephanie Adamczak

I am a post-doctoral researcher in the Beltran lab. I study the intersection between individual traits, fitness, and population demography. My PhD explored how deviation from expected body size influenced lifetime reproductive success in elephant seals. My current research is an extension of this work and examines the behavioral and physiological consequences of body size variation and the drivers of trait variation in the marine environment.

Molly McEntee

As a post-doctoral researcher in the Beltran lab, I am interested in environmental drivers of sex-biased mortality. My PhD examined sexual conflict, reproductive investment, and sex-biased mortality in Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins.

Lalitha Balachandran

My PhD was in linguistics, and investigated how readers use sentence structure to guide memory retrieval processes during sentence comprehension. In my current role as a postdoctoral researcher in field-based biology education, I study how cognitive and affective outcomes of field courses affect subsequent discipline-specific learning. 

Haider Ali Bhatti

I’m an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow as part of the Beltran/Zavaleta lab’s “Field-based Undergraduate Training: Utilizing Research for Equity (FUTURE) in Biology” grant. My research interests are broadly focused on measuring student learning, particularly through assessment of affective student outcomes using strategies like Rasch analysis and Item Response Theory. I received my PhD in Science Education from the SESAME program at UC Berkeley where I studied the impact of challenge-based learning in a course called “Bioinspired Design” as part of our HHMI “Eyes Toward Tomorrow” program. 

Paige Kouba

I completed my PhD at UC Davis, studying how climate and fire shape California forests, from leaves to landscapes. While teaching undergraduate ecology courses and leading grad student orientation trips, I developed a lot of questions about what makes for positive, transformative learning communities. Now, as an NSF FUTURE in Biology postdoc with Roxanne, Erika Zavaleta, and Robin Dunkin, I’m researching how peer and mentorship networks form in field-based educational settings, and how positive community-building experiences can support marginalized students in STEM.

Florencia Vilches – Fulbright Fellow (Argentina), Co-advised with Dan Costa

My research focuses on the dynamic interaction between environmental changes and migratory marine mammal habitat use. I employ stable isotope analysis of continuously growing tissues, such as whiskers and baleen plates, along with biologging and oceanographic data, to understand how oceanographic anomalies and prey availability interact with northern elephant seal and southern right whale movement and foraging.

Allison Payne – Co-advised with Elliot Hazen

My research involves detecting beaked whales via passive acoustic monitoring, both from fixed seafloor hydrophones and from elephant seal-borne acoustic tags. I’m also interested in elephant seal demography, utilizing long-term datasets, exploring the “science of biologging science”, education research, and facilitating interdisciplinary scientific projects.

Danial Palance – Co-advised with Elliot Hazen

My research centers on the spatial and foraging ecology of top predators and their prey in a changing ocean. Grounded in the context of marine hotspots, I use a combination of modeling, remote sensing, and field research methods such as biologging to examine trophic and single species hotspots in the California Current and Northeast Pacific.

Milagros Guadalupe Rivera – Co-advised with Rachel Meyer

My name is Milagros Guadalupe Rivera and I am a PhD student co-advised by Drs. Roxanne Beltran and Rachel Meyer. My research interests lie broadly in population genomics and what makes species like the northern elephant seal successful after an extreme population bottleneck. I am also interested in the heritability of fitness traits such as lifetime reproductive success and the genetic basis of deep-diving in pinnipeds. I am also super passionate about science communication and creating scientific illustrations. I enjoy horror movies, art, going to zoos/aquariums, and am the parent of two cats and dozens of houseplants!

Zabe Premo

Current Research Interest: Marine mammal physiology (juvenile Northern elephant seals)

Future Research Aims: Environmental Epigenetics, Toxicology, Marine Mammal Health and Pathology

Esin Ickin

Madison Pfau

Maddie Stewart (2022 cohort – Senior thesis)

My thesis is focused on studying the ontogeny of sexual size dimorphism in juvenile northern elephant seals by analyzing their head, teeth, and flippers. I am looking for a specific point in their juvenile development at which the head, teeth, and flippers of these animals become different between sexes and across age classes.

Adrien Bastidas (2023 cohort – Senior thesis)

For my senior thesis I am studying terminal investment in northern elephant seals. Using our long term dataset, I plan to see whether or not mothers in their last year of life put in more effort to produce a high-quality pup and, if so, if it works.

Kelli Ong (2023 cohort – Senior thesis)

My project investigates if it is possible to measure animals without touching them by using three cutting-edge methods: aerial drone scans, photogrammetry, and iPad-based Light, Detection & Ranging (LiDAR) scans, using northern elephant seals as measuring subjects. Our goal is to demonstrate that these remote measurement tools can be a safe, accurate, and reliable alternative for gathering vital body condition data on large animals.

Madeline Cheu (2023 cohort – Senior thesis)

My senior thesis revolves around the extrinsic drivers of interannual variation in recruitment age, the age at which a female first reproduces. With this project, I aim to assess the effects of ocean oscillations (ENSO, NPGO, PDO), population density, and the timing of female elephant seals’ return to the colony at Año Nuevo on the age of recruitment.

Dana DePiero (2023 cohort)

Aditi Jacob (2024 cohort – Senior thesis)

I am interested in exploring maternal behavior and pup loss during the breeding season. With my project, I aim to assess the effects of harem density, weather and tidal cycles, and maternal age on the probability of pup separations using long-term observational data.

Gabby Corneille (2024 cohort)