Hayley Zemel
Program Associate
Phone: (510) 251-8322
Email: hayley.zemel@calost.org
Soon after completing her 2012 California Sea Grant Fellowship with the Ocean Science Trust, Hayley Zemel continued with OST as a Program Associate. Her focus in this position is to advance OST’s understanding of the benefits and challenges of existing citizen science models and use that information to help develop a citizen science program that can contribute to sustained and cost-effective MPA monitoring efforts useful for decision-makers.
Hayley is finishing her master’s program at Cal State Long Beach in Marine Ecotoxicology, where she’s been working with Dr. Kevin Kelley on a project that uses ecotoxicoproteomics as a tool to understand the relationships between contaminant exposures and physiological health of fish. Ecotoxicoprotiomics is a timely and cost-effective multifactorial approach that enables analysis of multiple physiological responses to multiple contaminants within a single tissue sample. With further development, this method can act as a great management tool that identifies specific effects of anthropogenic activities on the health of aquatic ecosystems and can serve as a screening methodology to predict types or classes of chemical exposures. Hayley has also held the position of Wetland Restoration and Monitoring Coordinator for Tidal Influence, an ecological restoration consulting firm. As Monitoring Coordinator, Hayley elicited the help of citizen scientists engaged with the Pacific Coast Environmental Conservancy volunteer program to implement ecotoxicoproteomics as a tool to monitor the restoration effectiveness.
