Kelsey Stanbro

​Kelsey Stanbro grew up on the east coast and attended the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia where she played on the volleyball team and received a degree in Marine Conservation with minors in both Environmental Sustainability and Business Administration. At Mary Washington Kelsey studied the impact of climate change on eastern oyster populations, how increasing surface water temperatures from climate change impact copepods, and how the introduction of northern snakeheads in the Potomac River Basin is affecting largemouth bass populations. After university Kelsey spent two years working as an English teacher in Bangkok, Thailand. During this time, she volunteered at a university doing coral restoration and leading educational school trips to the area. Kelsey decided to further her education and attended the University of Bremen in Bremen, Germany where she received a master’s degree in marine biology. Kelsey wrote her student research project on the feeding behavior of mesopelagic fish using stable isotope analysis and her graduate thesis on the trophodynamics of mesopelagic fish in the Benguela Upwelling System using stomach content and fatty acid analysis. She has worked at the Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Research modelling food-web dynamics in the Humboldt Upwelling System and at the Thünen Institute for Sea Fisheries where she worked with mesopelagic fish in the Benguela Upwelling System and Canary current and spent 3 months on a research ship collecting samples.