I am a graduate student at the University of California, Davis, where I am working to complete a master’s degree in Environmental Policy and Management. Previously, I graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz (class of 2015), where I majored in Environmental Studies. I have participated in several internships devoted to environmental stewardship, dating back to 2011. While attending Lake Tahoe Community College (2010-2013), I volunteered for the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection where I was assigned to a monitoring team that inspected tributary streams in the Lake Tahoe basin, for water quality concerns. In the fall of 2014, I interned at the UC Santa Cruz College Eight garden and worked to enhance soil quality by integrating organic matter with appropriate soil aggregates to improve water holding capacity and soil structure. In the winter of 2015, I interned for the UC Santa Cruz campus stewardship program. In this program, I worked on several projects on campus and on UC natural reserve land to conduct restoration work on degraded or disturbed landscapes. We restored degraded trails, pulled invasive species, planted native species, and restored the native habitat to historical conditions. The following quarter in the spring of 2015, I assisted researchers on a rockfish life history project at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center, Fisheries Ecology Division in Santa Cruz, CA. While with NOAA, I conducted fecundity analysis on several rockfish species to provide data for rockfish stock assessments in the Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary. Since June of 2015, I have been a Policy Intern with the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research (OPR), where I helped launch a biochar research initiative to guide environmental stewardship efforts using biochar production as an alternative waste stream management practice for forest tree mortality and agricultural waste biomass. Through our efforts, we have built a coalition of state/federal agencies that are actively participating in a coordinated effort to evaluate the potential for biochar’s use to address several of our State’s most challenging environmental concerns (climate change, drought, and severe forest tree mortality).