Hailing from the salt-encrusted coast of New England, Rachel grew up with a passion for the ocean and the creatures that live just beneath the water’s surface, leading her to become a marine ecologist. Wild places first captured her heart on a life-changing 2009 expedition to Baffin Island to investigate climate change in the eastern Canadian Arctic. This expedition was the first of many, kick-starting a lifestyle of exploring and photographing this incredible planet, doing meaningful science and sharing these endeavors with others.

Rachel studied marine ecology and graduated from College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, where Acadia National Park was her back yard and the endlessly fascinating Gulf of Maine was her front yard. Here she learned to sea kayak, scuba dive and sail; started training in wilderness medicine; and worked for the local marine mammal research lab, Allied Whale. She curated humpback whale photo-ID catalogs, studied dead stranded marine mammals and conducted her own research on marine pollutants in the local food web. Here and on a small island lighthouse and research station located 25miles out in the Gulf of Maine, Rachel started driving Zodiacs andguiding small adventure groups. She has since worked on a variety ofsmall research vessels in the North Atlantic as a deckhand, dive-tender,mate and captain.

Rachel’s current research is focused on marine conservation in the Gulf of St. Lawrence working with the non-profit research group Mingan Island Cetacean Study. Since 2011 she has studied the impacts of modern ocean threats such as fishing gear entanglement and ship strikes on populations of large baleen whales recovering from historical commercial whaling. One of the most important tools for this research is scientific photography, specifically capturing pigmentation patterns on a whale that allow it to be recognized as an individual and tracked over time. While she made her first foray into photography as a science tool tocapture and identify individual whales, she fell in love with it as anart form. Years of experience photographing speed-swimming whales from a moving vessel and trying to operate a camera in wet, windy, and cold conditions has yielded many lessons that Rachel is happy to share with others looking to tackle the challenges of wildlife photography.

Rachel splits her time seasonally between conducting research and leading expeditions in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Alaska, Greenland and Antarctica. She is passionate about working toward healthier oceans, protecting wild places and better communication and community involvement in science. Having spent years observing and photographing whales for science, she knows how much you can learn about an animal just by watching it, and she is excited to share these special moments in the wild.