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Laura Nazzaro currently manages Dr. Kohut’s Dynamic Marine Ecology Lab. Under Dr. Kohut’s supervision, she earned her M.S. in Oceanography in 2011 with a thesis focused on modeling ecological interactions between regional fisheries datasets and the oceanographic datasets measured by RUCOOL. After completing her degree she has continued serving RUCOOL on a variety of projects, including many centered around ecological modeling, as well as in daily data operations. She is experienced in Python, MATLAB, R, and shell scripting and has played a key role in the development and maintenance of data processing, quality control, analysis and visualization for Slocum glider, HF radar, and satellite data collected by RUCOOL and its partners. In her role as lab manager, she continues many of these same duties, with particular focus on dynamic habitat modeling of a variety of animals from fishes to large marine mammals. As part of this role, she is also an additional support for RUCOOL students, especially those supervised by Dr. Kohut, and provides support for proposals, reports, publications, and presentations led or co-led by Dr. Kohut and other RUCOOL faculty. Her ecological research stresses the importance of strong collaboration, often involving a wide variety of collaborators from different universities and different disciplines as well as stakeholders ranging from the fishing industry to the wind industry. It also highlights the importance of research that can be directly applied to a dynamic ecosystem in ways that support the variety of stakeholders living and working in a highly dynamic region experiencing a growing number of ocean uses, and has been used to improve fisheries management and conservation of the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale.