Michelle María Early Capistrán | Stanford University

About Me

I am currently a Smith Fellow at Stanford University. For over a decade, I’ve worked with rural fishing communities in Baja California to improve conservation strategies for culturally important green sea turtles. My transdisciplinary research focuses on integrating local ecological knowledge and marine ecology to to understand synergistic ecological, biophysical, and social processes and improve conservation outcomes. Here are my publications and here is a curriculum vitae.

I was originally trained as a Cultural Anthropologist and hold an M.S. and PhD in Marine Science and Limnology (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, UNAM). I’m also a collaborator at the Mathematical Ecology Lab at CICESE, a federally-funded STEM research institute in Ensenada, Mexico. I am also a member of the IUCN Marine Turtle Specialist Group, the global authority on marine turtles that provides actionable scientific and policy guidance topromote and guide the conservation of marine turtles and their habitats.

I am currently a board member of the Next Generation Sonoran Desert Researchers (N-Gen), an international research network with 900+ members from 40+ disciplines dedicated to fostering biocultural collaboration and innovative transdisciplinary action. I’m also committed to outreach and community science as one of the founders of the Border BioBlitz, a multinational community science effort that aims to document and highlight the extraordinary biodiversity of the US-Mexico borderlands. I also collaborate in science communication with outlets and organizations like Current Conservation, DataMares, and El CoLaboratorio de Oceanología Social. Here is some of my published outreach and science communication.