Stephanie is a marine mammal scientist who began her career studying finback and humpback whales from a small isolated lighthouse island off the coast of Bar Harbor, Maine. This project—an effort to identify individual whales by matching dorsal fin shapes, natural color patterns and any acquired scars—sought to catalog all the mammals that populate the waters from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the New York Bight.
She has a bachelor’s degree in human ecology from College of the Atlantic and a master's degree in marine policy from the University of Rhode Island. She has also worked on various marine mammal projects ranging from collecting small skin samples using a crossbow to spending countless hours in small planes during aerial surveys. She was part of the North Atlantic Right Whale Project, studying one of the most endangered large whales.
When she is not working on expedition ships, Stephanie is a field assistant for a tropical, temperate and polar marine invertebrate comparison project for the British Antarctic Survey. The project has study sites in Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and at the Norwegian Polar Institute’s research station on Svalbard.
Stephanie has worked on Lindblad Expeditions-National Geographic ships since 1999. She has sailed on trips as a naturalist, lecturer and Zodiac driver in both polar regions and throughout the Atlantic Ocean. She loves sharing her knowledge of the natural world and the spirit of adventure found on expedition ships.
