Ashley Clark joins the 2025 Hawaiʻi Sea Grant Knauss cohort as an executive fellow, serving in the NOAA Oceanic and Atmospheric Research Office of International Activities (OAR/IA). In this role, she will support NOAA’s international partnerships, such as its bilateral relation with Korea Sea Grant and multilateral engagement with the All-Atlantic Ocean Research and Innovation Alliance (AAORIA).

Ashley is a former East-West Center Graduate Degree fellow (2022-2024) and a University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa alumna. She holds a Master of Arts in Geography and the Environment, a Graduate Certificate in Ocean Policy, and a Certificate in Geographic Information Science (GIS). For her master’s thesis, Ashley conducted three months of fieldwork in Northern Taiwan studying tea production by engaging with Pong-Fong tea producers. Ashley’s interest in tea production began when living in Taipei, Taiwan from 2019 to 2021 when attending an intensive Mandarin program as a 2019 Hua-yu (Mandarin) Language Fellow. She is delighted to learn about international partnership building and science diplomacy, while also contributing her experience working in international environments.

With a longstanding interest in environmental justice, Ashley is also passionate about supporting coastal communities at the frontlines of climate change. For Ashley’s Ocean Policy capstone, she participated in the NASA DEVELOP program as a remote sensing researcher, in Summer 2024, to determine the feasibility of using satellite data to monitor water quality in Hilo Bay on Hawaiʻi Island. Her team collaborated with the County of Hawaiʻi’s Office of Sustainability, Climate, Equity and Resilience, and Arizona State University’s Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science. Ashley values open science and is eager to sharpen her science writing ability to support community engagement on climate issues and environmental hazards.