MEDS 2022
Pronouns: she/her
Bio
Grace Lewin has a passion for understanding and conserving the natural world. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology from the University of California, Davis. While pursuing her degree and after graduation, Grace has had multiple experiences that have reinforced this passion. She studied the Garden Route in South Africa, where she was intrigued by its diverse ecosystems and unique conservation challenges. Grace also conducted an undergraduate independent research project at UC Davis studying seed dispersal in a California serpentine environment. She pursued additional research opportunities as a field technician in the Young Lab at UCSB studying the impact of wildlife loss and human change on community dynamics and ecological processes. Grace sees the importance in working across disciplines, highlighted by her work at the Mpala Research Center in Kenya as an NSF REU intern. There, building upon knowledge gained from ecology, engineering, and computer science, she built and implemented novel, low-cost, autonomous remote sensing devices to measure the carbon flux of the savanna grassland ecosystem. This interdisciplinary experience has led her to pursue a Master of Environmental Data Science degree at the Bren School. Grace is excited to utilize data science skills to integrate interdisciplinary data to discover new insights and solutions to environmental problems.