Haleh Mawson

Proudest Moment: Tie between not getting stuck in hip-deep mud on a Willapa tideflat and managing to crawl to firmer ground, and that time I started running in Costa Rica right before the local biologist purposefully disturbed a wasp nest. (I can recognize a mean prank when I see one.)

I'm a runner, backpacker, ecologist, and statistics fiend who spent the four years of my college career getting closer and closer to working in the ocean full-time. Plants are my main passion. I started out with terrestrial stuff my first few years, working in the UW Herbarium in Hitchcock's basement, but got into algae and marine angiosperms after spending a quarter at Friday Harbor Laboratory in the San Juan Islands. I took a break over that summer to study abroad in Costa Rica with Drs. Moon Draper and Jon Herron, and then returned to Seattle to work as an undergraduate researcher in the Hille Ris Lambers Lab, using herbarium specimens of lupines to compare insectivory rates from the 1890s to the present. Dr. Jennifer Ruesink snatched me up after that, and from spring 2020 to late summer 2021 I've worked for her lab, looking at eelgrass and burrowing shrimp interactions on oyster farms in Willapa Bay, WA. My most recent accomplishment as of writing this (spring 2021) was getting into a full-funded M.Sc aquaculture program based in Oban, Scotland, with time spent in Heraklion, Greece, and Nantes, France. It turns out people will pay you to mess around with marine organisms and travel - who knew?