Sandy received her B.S. in Natural Resources from the University of Arizona, and M.S. in Environmental Biology from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, with emphases in wildlife management. Her undergraduate research assessed how Mexican woodrats respond to landscape burns from historic fire as measured in their movement patterns. For her Master’s thesis, she used published data to examine how the magnitude of livestock depredation by carnivores varies by spatiotemporal scale, and to model global leopard density using variables at predictive scales.

Currently, Sandy is a Ph.D. student in Biology at the University of Oxford, studying the non-lethal impacts of wire snaring on African lions as measured in reproductive, nutritional/energetic, and survival costs within Murchison Falls National Park, Uganda. Though raised in Tucson, Arizona in the southwestern U.S., Sandy was born in Munich as a dual German-American citizen and looks forward to further engaging with new cultures and expanding her career abroad. Her long-term goal is to work as a research scientist specializing in large carnivore ecology and conservation.