People – Beltran Lab

Principal Investigator

Roxanne Beltran
roxanne@ucsc.edu; click here for CV

2020	Assistant Professor	UC Santa Cruz
2019	Postdoctoral Researcher	UC Santa Cruz
2018	PhD	University of Alaska Fairbanks (defense video)
2015	MSc	University of Alaska Anchorage (defense video).

The Beltran Lab group & BIOE 128L field course students, Spring 2024

Researchers

Natalie Storm
(Lab 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.

Post-Doctoral Researchers

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.

Graduate Students

Florencia Vilches (PhD Student)
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 (PhD Student)
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.

Salma Abdel-Raheem (PhD Student)

My research is focused on the behavior and development of Northern elephant seals from weaning to age 3. I use biologging instruments to track the at-sea behavior of juvenile seals across age and sex. I am interested in describing and quantifying the habitat use of juveniles to better understand the extreme life history of the most sexually size dimorphic species. I am excited to learn and use quantitative and computational tools to contribute to the broader knowledge of this model system. I enjoy reading, rowing, and long walks or bike rides.

Danial Palance (PhD Student)
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 (PhD Student)
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!