Cullen Molitor: Biography

I am is a marine ecologist with expertise in long term monitoring of kelp forest environments in California. I graduated from Humboldt State University in 2014 where I studied history, mathematics, and scientific diving. I enjoys outdoor activities such as mountain biking, camping, and freediving. I am a recent graduate of the Master of Environmental Data Science program at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at UC Santa Barbara. Before going back to school, I have worked five seasons with Channel Islands National Park’s Kelp Forest Monitoring Program where I developed my skills in subtidal field methods, data collection, data quality control, and database management. I am interested in how ecological communities change in response to environmental stressors such as climate patterns, fishing pressure, and disease events. I aspire to continue working in marine ecology with expanded data processing, modeling, and presentation skills tp apply towards improving our understanding of these complex ecosystems. My goal is to produce products that effectively synthesize long term datasets to understand the processes which drive kelp forest communities, and ultimately share this understanding with the scientific community and the broader public. In school I also became interested in remote sensing and spatial analysis which is currently the field I am pursuing.