Gabriel Cira
Project Lead
Gabriel is a licensed architect based in Massachusetts. He has brought this project from the initial idea through multiple awards and grants to its present funded R&D activities and strong community links. Gabriel is active in local politics and advocacy in the Boston area, including the discourse on city-wide adaptation to climate change. He teaches the longstanding Architecture of Boston course at MassArt, which connects cooperative infrastructure history with the future of climate resilience. Growing up on Cape Cod, Gabriel has been a sailor since he was 5 years old.
Noa Randall
Research Engineer
Noa grew up in Cambridge, MA, and studied engineering, sustainable food systems, and coastal marine science at Smith College. She has worked at NOAA Fisheries, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the U.S. Geological Survey on a variety of estuarine and coastal sediment transport projects, before joining The Emerald Tutu in early 2023. Noa is a salt marsh enthusiast, an avid question-asker, and ranks kale as her favorite field snack.
Kayla Sklar
Research Engineer
Kayla grew up in Arizona and was drawn to the outdoors but found her passion with the ocean. She studied environmental science specializing in marine and environmental research and fieldwork at Northeastern University. She has worked at the Marine Biological Lab in Woods Hole, various ecology labs at Northeastern, and at BlueWave Solar on early stage due diligence and development of renewables and land contract negotiations. Kayla joined The Emerald Tutu in the spring of 2024 excited to dive head first into hands-on, nature-based projects.
Louiza Wise
Research Engineer
Louiza graduated from Northeastern University in 2021 with a degree in Environmental Engineering. As a student she was involved in many community-focused engineering activities including research on the ability of constructed wetlands to improve water quality. Louiza grew up in Cleveland, Ohio bordering both Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga River where issues of water quality are ever-present in public discourse. She joined the Emerald Tutu in 2021, bringing her project leadership experience as well as industry experience with constructed wetlands and their impact on natural environments
Dr. Julia Hopkins
Coastal Hydrodynamics Scientist
Julia currently works at the MIT Lincoln Lab for coastal projects. Before that, Julia was an assistant professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering department at Northeastern University. Her lab, the Coastal Urban Resilience and Environmental Solutions (CURES) lab, used field observations, numerical models, and targeted lab experiments to investigate how waves and tidal currents impact natural and urban shorelines. Prior to NU, Julia was a postdoctoral associate at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, working on sand-based natural solutions for the sinking Dutch coastline. Julia was receiving her PhD from the MIT-WHOI joint Program in 2018 when she joined the Emerald Tutu team as a founding member.
Tyler McCormack
Coastal Hydrology Researcher
Tyler pursued a Bachelor of Science in Civil and Environmental Engineering with a minor in sustainability studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, and is currently a PhD candidate at Northeastern University in Boston, MA. His research focuses on combining various remote sensing methods (video cameras, LiDAR scanners, and satellites) with in situ measurements to characterize relationships between surface and subsurface processes in the surfzone. Tyler assisted with field and laboratory experimentation and analysis for the Emerald Tutu through his former PhD advisor Julia Hopkins.
Jesse Beckman
Affiliated Researcher
Jesse grew up near the coast in southeastern Virginia before attending Longwood University in Farmville, VA where he received a Bachelors of Science in Integrated Environmental Science. Jesse then attended the University of North Carolina, Wilmington where his thesis research focused on understanding storm impacts on barrier islands, receiving a Masters of Science in Geoscience. Jesse is currently a PhD candidate at Northeastern University in Boston, MA where his research focuses on using numerical models, in situ data, and satellite measurements to study coastal flooding and environmentally friendly methods to mitigate coastal flooding hazards.
Dr. Nicholas Lutsko
Climate Scientist
Nick is an assistant professor of Climate Science at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. His research combines theory, numerical modeling and observations to understand the changing circulation of Earth’s atmosphere, and study the climate system holistically in order to better predict how it will respond to rising CO2 concentrations. He leads the development of network scale models for the Emerald Tutu to study how a floating biomass network can be used to attenuate wave energy. Nick was a postdoctoral associate at MIT (2017-2019) when he joined the Emerald Tutu team as a founding member.
Drew Bouchie
2024 Summer Intern
Drew recently graduated from Boston University with a B.A. in Earth and Environmental Science and a minor in Marine Science. He grew up in Gloucester, Massachusetts with a deep love for the ocean and the ways that humans interact with it. Drew has previous experience researching bottlenose dolphins in the Mediterranean Sea and greenhouse gas fluxes in New England salt marshes. When not on the marsh, Drew spends his time cooking, fishing, and exploring the North Shore of Massachusetts on his boat.
Rayna Carner
2024 Fall Intern
Rayna is from Natick, MA and studied Earth Science and Environmental Studies at Tulane University in New Orleans. At Tulane, she wrote her Senior Thesis about carbon storage in marshes created by river diversions on the lower Mississippi. As an intern at the Emerald Tutu in 2024, she helped harvest and store marsh grass seeds, deploy floating marsh prototypes, and build living shorelines. She is now working for the National Park Service out in Colorado.
Tyler Chidsey
2022 Summer Intern
Tyler Chidsey, Summer intern:Tyler grew up on the North Shore of MA and has been an avid ocean-goer all his life. He graduated from Boston University, where he studied marine science (BA) and ecology/conservation biology (MS). He joined the Emerald Tutu in Summer 2022 to assist with biogeochemical experimentation and modeling.
emerald-tutu.com 