We are excited to announce that Tessa Francis is the newest member of the Puget Sound Institute team, and begins her appointment as a Research Scientist at the end of this month.

Francis is most recently an NRC Postdoctoral Fellow at NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center, where her work has focused on food web dynamics of the Northern California Current. During her postdoc, she has investigated the role of climate and environmental variables on the community interactions and stability of Oregon coastal zooplankton, used qualitative modeling to identify key prey and predators of California Current groundfish species, and reviewed the use of scenarios in efforts to describe future states in the Puget Sound Ecosystem. Her primary interests relate to dynamics that occur across the land-water interface and within food webs.

Francis holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Wildlife Science from the University of Washington. She received her PhD in Zoology and Urban Ecology from the University of Washington in 2009.