Alicia graduated with a B.S. in Biology from The George Washington University in 2003. After completing her undergraduate studies, she worked as a taxonomy technician for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Systematics Laboratory at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC. Two years later she relocated to NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) in Woods Hole, MA, and would continue her career over the next 15+ years working on a variety of fisheries issues including collecting and processing fisheries and oceanographic data, developing ecosystem-based surveys, utilizing tagging data to better understand the marine migration of Atlantic salmon, working to include environmental variables in modeling population dynamics, developing data visualization techniques, and modeling entanglement risk of fixed gear fisheries on large whales. While working at the NEFSC she also completed a M.S. in 2010 from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s School of Marine Science and Technology where her research investigated the effects of epizootic shell disease on early life history of the American lobster. Alicia joined the Grabowski Lab in 2021 and hopes to focus her dissertation research around her current work with North Atlantic right whales.