The morphological and physiological adaptations that have allowed marine mammals to overcome the challenges associated with the recolonization of the aquatic environment confer unique life history traits that are uncommon in terrestrial mammals and have converged independently in distinct lineages. While these life history strategies make marine mammals interesting models to study adaptations to stress, perturbations characteristic of modern environments may increase marine mammals’ susceptibility to direct and indirect anthropogenic stressors. Emily is a PhD candidate in the Vázquez-Medina lab at UC Berkeley. She is broadly interested in studying how increased anthropogenic stressors in the world’s oceans affect marine mammals. Her projects seek to contribute to our understanding of the effects of stress exposure at different levels of biological organization in marine mammals from developing an ex vivo cell model to understand how stress hormones affect whale physiology to studying how changes in habitat temperature and quality alter thermoregulatory physiology and behavior in elephant seals. The results of these studies will provide direct evidence on the potential consequences of increased stress exposure on marine mammal biology and health.