Leigh Engel is a 2025 Grau Fellow with the Office of Conservation and Coastal Lands (OCCL), where she supports the Coastal Lands Program in managing and protecting Hawaiʻi’s shoreline resources. She focuses on implementing novel, place-based approaches to coastal erosion and hazard mitigation while advancing long-term goals of conserving beaches, dunes, and other vital coastal ecosystems. Through this fellowship, Leigh hopes to learn from and listen to the people and places that shape Hawaiʻi’s coastal communities and contribute collaborative solutions grounded in natural systems.

Leigh holds an M.S. in Natural Resources and Environmental Management from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where she was a Pacific Islands Climate Adaptation Science Center (PI-CASC) Scholar. Her thesis evaluated the traits and swim performance of endemic and introduced freshwater fish species to understand how extreme high-flow events affect stream ecosystems and inform mauka to makai management and restoration efforts across Hawaiʻi. A former fisheries biologist and chief scientist with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries and later a program manager and Tribal biologist with the Sitka Tribe of Alaska, she spent over a decade working across varied ecosystems and governance systems. This collective experience—from post–Deepwater Horizon monitoring and baseline data collection to research, restoration, and collaborations with Native Sovereign Nations and Tribal consortia—has shaped her understanding of who is involved in conservation, whose voices are centered, and how perspectives, reciprocal relationships, and natural systems support both ecosystems and communities.