Jennifer E. Smith

Early life and education Smith was an undergraduate student at the California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, where she majored in zoology. She moved to the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa for her doctoral research, which investigated algal blooms and the impacts of nutrients and invasive species on community structure supervised by Tropical reefs are increasingly dominated by algal blooms, with different types of algal blooms emerging on different reefs in the Hawaiian Islands. Specifically, she is interested in diversity within coral reef communities, and how to better understand coral reef restoration. She has visited the same coral reefs every year for over a decade, allowing her to better understand how they change over time. She also identified that adding a small amount of Asparagopsis to cattle feed can reduce the methane emissions from dairy cows.

Smith studied corals in the remote central Pacific and identified that in the absence of human disturbance, coral reefs were relatively resilient to climate-associated impacts. Baselines and degradation of coral reefs in the Northern Line Islands High-frequency dynamics of ocean pH: a multi-ecosystem comparison