Caroline is a forest and fungal ecologist, originally from middle Tennessee. She first came to Outer Coast as a visiting faculty member in the 2022 Spring semester and now serves as Faculty in Ecology and Director of Academic Administration and Advising. Prior to coming to Sitka, she was a Lecturer in Civic, Liberal, and Global Education at Stanford University, teaching interdisciplinary courses in the first year requirement. She holds a PhD in Ecology and Evolution with a doctoral minor in Education from Stanford University, and she is an alumna of the University of Tennessee. Her research investigates how symbioses between plants and fungi shape forests and what these relationships can teach us about stewarding ecosystems in the face of global changes. In Southeast Alaska’s temperate rainforests, where Pacific salmon return to their natal streams in immense numbers each year to spawn, she is studying the role fungi play in transferring those marine-derived nutrients into the forest ecosystem. In her teaching, she invites students to harness their own lived experiences to investigate, question, and grow the narratives we learn and tell about humans and the natural world. When she’s not in the lab or in the classroom, Caroline is probably in the kitchen, in the ceramics studio, or outside on foot or on a bike.
