Dr. Lora Harris is an estuarine ecologist at UMCES who applies field and modeling approaches to address important questions regarding nutrient dynamics, primary production and ecosystem structure and function in a range of estuarine ecosystems. She is especially interested in how climate and management actions interact to affect water quality characteristics in estuaries and lagoons. She has also spent some time considering nutrient dynamics in coastal watersheds. Some of her most recent work involves collaboration with engineers to understand the restoration trajectories of hypoxic estuaries, and the contribution of wastewater to estuarine receiving waters. Dr. Harris works closely with state and regional agencies in both a research and advisory capacity. She is committed to efforts that increase diversity in the geosciences as a founding principal investigator of Centro Tortuga, an institutional collaboration based in Puerto Rico that is focused on exposing first year undergraduates to the marine sciences. Her laboratory emphasizes cutting edge research that produces insights and results that are useful to communities, management, and policy. Now an Associate Professor at UMCES, Dr. Harris received her Ph.D. in Oceanography from the University of Rhode Island and completed a Postdoctoral position at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole.