I have participated in several international working groups that have resulted in ongoing collaborations and peer-reviewed publications (several in review or in prep currently). Specifically, two collaborative projects examined the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem services (a working group at NCEAS and several working groups in a multi-university graduate seminar). The resulting multi-author papers empirically investigate the role of biodiversity in the provisioning of ecosystem services (e.g. fisheries, carbon sequestration) to improve decision-making about biodiversity conservation.    My PhD thesis extends these findings to a decision-making context, developing models and theory to identify when ecosystem services provide an economic incentive to protect biodiversity. I use decision-theoretic approaches to determine the optimal level of biodiversity protection to maximize ecosystem services in the present and future. This research resulted from my collaborations with an Economist, Mathematician, and Ecologist (the first paper to be submitted by June), and benefited from feedback I received during a three-month program on the mathematics of bio-economics in France.    While pursuing this main area of research, I have also co-authored a paper on the management of coral fish under limited information and advised a successful Master’s level project on the economic feasibility and consequences of aquaculture projects in Mexico.