Academic Credentials
  • Ph.D., Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, 2021
  • M.S., Earth Sciences, Stanford University, 2013
  • B.S., Earth Sciences, Stanford University, 2012
Professional Honors
  • Fulbright Futures Postdoctoral Fellow, 2022
  • National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, 2016-2020
  • Phi Beta Kappa, 2012
Professional Affiliations
  • Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) Advisory Committee, 2024-2027
  • Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO)
Languages
  • Spanish

Dr. Laura Lilly is a biological oceanographer with interdisciplinary background and expertise in marine food webs, climate-ocean dynamics, human use and management of coastal systems, and sustainability and climate solutions. Dr. Lilly possesses over a decade of experience in oceanography and marine resources, ecological systems, and climate change and adaptation, with extensive skills in both technical data analysis and effective communication.

Dr. Lilly's graduate and postdoctoral training focused on quantifying the impacts of climate variability and physical ocean changes on marine zooplankton and finfish in various geographic regions of the California Current System and global oceans. At Exponent, Dr. Lilly has focused on evaluation of potential ecological impacts of brine discharges from coastal oil and gas wells, offshore wind-induced electromagnetic fields (EMF), and various chemical contaminants in terrestrial, riparian, coastal, and deep-ocean environments. Dr. Lilly also has experience developing and implementing institutional waste reduction programs and extensive working knowledge of climate adaptation and engineering solutions, including carbon capture, uptake, and storage (CCUS) and marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR).

Dr. Lilly has various technical capabilities, including an array of statistical data analysis skills (timeseries analysis, ecological statistics, evaluation of large and incomplete datasets, and data interpolation), Lagrangian particle tracking, GIS mapping, and coding languages (R, MATLAB, Python). She has conducted extensive literature reviews, critical assessment of scientific publications and reports, and authored scientific blogs for public information outreach. Dr. Lilly has extensive experience in team collaboration and leadership as a seagoing oceanographer with over 250 days at sea, including on-the-deck troubleshooting ability for faulty scientific instrumentation and software.