Chela Zabin, PhD, is an ecologist with the Marine Invasions Laboratory at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Tiburon, CA, where she has been since 2005. In addition to studying non-native species, she has been researching and working to restore native Olympia oysters for 14 years in San Francisco Bay, Elkhorn Slough, and Tomales Bay.  She is the lead researcher for the oyster portion of two multi-species living shorelines projects in San Francisco Bay. She was chair of the San Francisco Bay Native Oyster Research Working Group for many years and is currently on the steering committee of the Native Olympia Oyster Collaborative, working to promote collaboration and information-sharing among Olympia oyster researchers and restoration practitioners along the West Coast from British Columbia to Baja California.

Karina Nielsen, PhD, is the director of the Estuary and Ocean Science Center, at San Francisco State University’s Romberg Tiburon campus. As a collaborator on this project, she brings a wealth of knowledge on seaweeds and the ecology of rocky shores. She earned a BS in Biology from Brooklyn College, City University of New York and a PhD in marine ecology from Oregon State University. She spent two years as an National Science Foundation International Postdoctoral Fellow at the Estación Costera de Investigaciones Marinas, Universidad Católica in Las Cruces, Chile and then another two years as postdoctoral fellow with the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans. Before coming to SF State as Executive Director of the Estuary & Ocean Science Center she was a Professor of Biology at Sonoma State University.