Staff spotlight: Michelle Tigchelaar
We had the opportunity to sit down and chat with Michelle Tigchelaar, a current Early Career Fellow and coordinator for the Oceans & Food Initiative at the Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions.
What led you to COS from your graduate work at University of Hawai’i at Mānoa?
As an undergrad at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, I really liked working on climate physics, so for my master's degree, I did a project on paleoclimate – where you're looking at climate change over really long periods of time. I really loved working on this because you get to think about what happens in the atmosphere and in the ocean and with ice and with plants; you get to think about all parts of the system. Following my master’s program, I went to the University of Hawai’i and was in an oceanography department but worked on climate modeling for 400,000-year ice sheet simulations.
After my PhD, I worked with David Battisti at the University of Washington. He also has a background in climate dynamics and paleoclimate but had started to work on food security issues, including crop yields and pests in agriculture. David had been a collaborator of Roz Naylor’s for a long time, and so David, Roz, and I worked on a few papers together. When COS was starting this new Oceans & Food initiative, Roz really wanted me to work on the project. That's how I got introduced to COS and how I ended up back in oceans after a little detour.
Right now, the Oceans & Food Initiative is hard at work supporting the Blue Food Assessment. What is the Blue Food Assessment and what has your involvement been with that project?
The Blue Food Assessment (BFA) came out of this recognition that when people talk about the future of food, they either forget that oceans and aquatic foods exist, or they make a blanket assumption that any increase in fish consumption is going to be better for our health and better for our planet because fish is better than beef. In reality, there are hundreds and hundreds of species of aquatic foods, which we've called “blue foods”, and hundreds of ways of producing them. Additionally, there are intricate trade linkages. So really the question is: will aquatic foods be a part of a more healthy, sustainable and just food system? It's a nuanced and difficult question.
For the BFA, we convened about twenty scientific experts to lead work on subsets of this question. They will write eight different papers and then synthesize them into a series of key messages that we can bring into important policy dialogues around the future food. Most directly, that will hopefully happen at the fall 2021 United Nations Food Summit. We're really hoping that through this work we can make sure that aquatic foods are represented in these international food dialogues in a nuanced and comprehensive way.
How has working and studying internationally influenced your work on global food security issues with COS?
Even though I've lived in different places, it still has been quite a Western focused life. When people discuss future diets or levers for change, there is a strong tendency to have a focus on how we, either in Europe or in the United States, eat. Having gotten to meet people from different parts of the world, I’ve realized that this is not the dominant mode, and that different solutions are going to be necessary in different parts of the world.
What drives your interest? What is your biggest motivation for the work that you do?
I originally rolled into science mostly because I found it really interesting and I loved learning. I was motivated by a curiosity about the world. Over the last five years in particular, that has morphed into a real sense of urgency and dread around the climate crisis that faces us. Once you start working on climate change, you can't turn back. I think we need all hands on deck. I feel really fortunate right now to be in a niche where I can both bring knowledge to the table and think about actual solutions.
When I was in Seattle, I was part of a group of researchers forming a union and I got to see what you can achieve when you come together. That was really inspiring. Now, seeing how many more people are caring about climate and are starting to raise their voices, I derive hope and optimism from that. I am connected with all these people doing art and communications and policy and energy development research and we're all in the same boat. It’s not about who is the smartest, but it's about giving each other space to despair, and then nudging each other on and solving the issue together.
How does your experience as a science communicator present itself in the work you do now with COS?
The Pacific Science Center is a local science museum in Seattle. They have a fellowship program where you take a design thinking approach to crafting key messages out of your research. Fellows get to talk with visitors at the museum a couple of times a year. The center has this exhibit called Science on a Sphere, which is a giant globe on which you project earth science data. You can then rotate, zoom in, show specific locations, or loop videos on the globe. It's a really nice way of engaging people with two-dimensional or three-dimensional spatial data.
I also started work on a web app called Climate Conversations, influenced by Professor Katharine Hayhoe, who says what we need to be doing is talking about climate. We built a database of climate events with open ended questions to get people talking about them. We then asked students to take it home for like Thanksgiving Break and have these climate conversations with their families.
Here at COS, that type of climate communication will morph into programming communication around what we do as an organization and as an initiative, and the kinds of messages that come out of our work.
What are some of your favorite hobbies?
I really like spending time in the mountains. I haven't done it as much as I would have liked to since I moved to California. But that was really quite a joy of moving to the States. I'm from a very flat country - The Netherlands - and my parents never really took me to the mountains on vacations. Then I moved to Hawai’i and I was like, “Oh, this is really beautiful!”
Do you have a favorite ocean-related experience?
The Netherlands has five barrier islands and my great grandmother's family is from one of them. My great grandfather and mother built a vacation house there at some point that they could go and visit. I spent a week or two every summer on that beach. I remember dragging our little shovels out there and making forts. And then our dad just throwing us into the surf break every day, for entire afternoons. They also used to have this ice cream that was a brought out on a horse-drawn cart; it was a sausage of vanilla ice cream and they would cut you off a slice of ice cream sausage and then put it between these two different wafers. I don't think I've seen that ice cream anywhere else since my childhood.
If you could give one piece of advice to a young person interested in ocean-related work, what would it be?
Looking back at my own journey, I remember always being really interested in social science, history and geography. But as soon as I got to undergrad, people said, “well, you're really good at natural science,” and sort of pushed me to follow that route. I started to notice this very strong viewpoint that the best work is the work that is the most mathematical and the most theoretical.
I think that's how I got sucked into this natural science tour for a long time before I finally thought, “I'm really interested in human natural systems and this work is really hard, maybe harder than coming up with the most theoretical mathematical mode.” So, my advice would: be don't get distracted by what other people tell you is difficult and important.
