Interview by Lisa Watts MEM’04
Kirsten Moy BS’11, grew up in Chapel Hill, N.C., surrounded by science and the sea. Her father studied marine science at Duke, and her mother ran an autism research lab at UNC, giving Kirsten both campuses as her childhood playground. She followed her passion to Duke as an undergraduate, where a transformative semester at the Duke Marine Lab and a sea turtle conservation course in Trinidad & Tobago set the trajectory for her career. After graduation, Kirsten served with the National Park Service in St. Croix and then joined the Peace Corps in Panama, where she helped a local community monitor one of just 11 arribada Olive Ridley sea turtle nesting beaches in the world. She eventually made her way to Hawai’i, where she became the state’s first marine debris coordinator and has spent nearly a decade working on coral reef restoration, coastal resilience, and marine resource management. Based in Seattle, Kirsten continues her work as a project manager for the Hawai’i Coral Reef Initiative and the State of Hawai’i’s Division of Aquatic Resources.
What first drew you to marine science and the ocean?
It was what my dad studied at Duke. He did his master’s in salt marshes, comparing man-made versus natural marshes. He couldn’t find work in the field he was passionate about—a mining company approached him and said, ‘Come and study our marshes,’ and he said, ‘No thank you.’ But we always grew up going to the beach. He knew all the species. We’d go to the aquarium and he’d identify every fish. We always had aquariums at home. My mom was this very accomplished, driven researcher, and I got to go into her lab and see the work she was doing. So I grew up in science—it was always that path for me.
What experiences at Duke most shaped your career?
Duke had this really amazing Marine Lab where my dad had studied, so it was full circle for me. I did a semester there as a sophomore and loved it so much I stayed the whole summer. I took classes with professors like Dave Johnston and Larry Crowder—Larry had actually been on my dad’s master’s committee at NC State, so I was his first student whose parent he’d also taught. But the real turning point was Scott Eckert’s sea turtle conservation biology course, which had a travel component to Trinidad. We worked on a leatherback nesting beach, and I remember walking out on the beach the first time—I’d grown up in North Carolina doing beach walks and never seen a sea turtle in the wild. The first one I ever saw was a leatherback, and I think I said, ‘Is that a dinosaur?’ Our project was called Team Big Mama—we measured the very largest turtles to inform the size of turtle excluder devices in fisheries. That experience put the travel bug in me and made me want to seek those kinds of hands-on field experiences.
I call myself a puka filler—in Hawaiian, puka means hole. My specialty is just filling puka. Find where the need is, fit your skills to that. You don’t need to be the expert. You just need to be adaptable. – Kirsten Moy
Tell us about your path from Duke to the Peace Corps.
After graduation, I got an internship through the Student Conservation Alliance with the National Park Service down in St. Croix, at Buck Island. It was a saturation project—we were out on the beach every single night, tagging every single turtle. After that, I just stayed in the Caribbean and worked in a coffee shop because it was such a perfect place—I instantly felt at home in that tropical atmosphere. Then I signed up for Peace Corps. I drew a firm line: I want to go somewhere with a coastline. They said I should be open to going anywhere, and I said, ‘Send me somewhere with a coastline.’ I got the choice between a Pacific or Caribbean sea turtle nesting site, and I thought, I’ve done Caribbean, let’s see what Pacific is like. It turned out to be one of just 11 beaches in the world with arribada nesting—we had around three to four thousand a night on a six-kilometer beach. They arrive in waves, going over each other, digging up each other’s nests. My role was helping the community participate in biological surveys and monitoring at the marine protected area.
How did you end up in Hawai’i?
After Peace Corps, my boyfriend at the time got offered a job in Hawai’i and said, ‘Why don’t we move there together?’ Hawai’i had always been kind of a dream—my great-grandfather had passed through Hawai’i while immigrating to the U.S. from Japan. I had no plan, no job. I became a secret shopper through an ad on Craigslist, taught art, volunteered at Hanauma Bay. I applied to about 30 jobs. Then I caught a break—a friend through the Park Service had a project ending with a little extra money, so I became the State of Hawai’i’s first marine debris coordinator. We flew the whole coastline doing high-resolution mapping so undergraduates could pan through the imagery and tag every piece of marine debris. When that project ended, my employers said, ‘We like you—how do you feel about day-use mooring buoys and manta ray tourism?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t know anything about those either, that sounds great.’
What are the most pressing challenges you see in coastal environments today?
Coastal resilience. We just completed a coral reef action plan focused on coral restoration for coastal protection. We’d finished the bleaching resilience plan—we were able to identify the places where it makes the most sense to restore coral reefs and the methods to use. But coastal protection is a much bigger beast. Proposing long-term sustainable solutions for protecting our coastlines, communities, and infrastructure against increasing storms and sea level rise—we have compounding impacts of development contributing to the decline of coral reefs. We’ve hardened all of our surfaces. We know definitively what the problems are, but implementing the solutions is so challenging. For example, Hawai’i is committed to converting all of its cesspools by 2050, but the cost is enormous. Hawai’i has the highest per-capita cesspools in the U.S., right along coastlines. We know what needs to happen, but actually fixing it feels a long way off.
If I can live my life contributing to and protecting this planet, then that’s payment enough. – Kirsten Moy
What are you most proud of in your career?
It’s personal connection, easily. Being able to work with other people who share passion and dedication to the resource. State government jobs—you are not in it for the salary. Everybody working in the natural resource space for conservation and protection is underpaid. The thing that keeps us all together is this common cause, this awareness that if I can live my life contributing to and protecting this planet, then that’s payment enough. Being able to go to work every day with people who share that mindset is wonderful. I’ve surrounded myself with a community of people who put their place first, above the individual. And being able to share that with early career staff who join my team—helping them get a little away from the ambitious corporate culture of climbing the ladder and instead sharing the value that is non-monetary.
What advice would you give to students graduating now?
I think it comes back to that puka-filling mentality—find what the need is and fit your skills to that. You don’t need to be the expert. You don’t need to be the best qualified for the job. You just need to be adaptable and personable, able to take information and synthesize solutions and work positively toward them. If you can keep that mindset, that openness, then you’re the best person for the job.
How did your time at Duke shape where you are today?
Education at Duke genuinely opened a lot of doors for me—both in reputation when people see it on a transcript, but also experientially, just for me personally. The richness of the education and the resources available to us—you don’t get afforded those kinds of opportunities at a lot of college campuses. Duke has so many really great programs to encourage students to have a real diverse education. My grandfather just turned 90, and I interviewed him for a Jeopardy game I put together. He went to Villanova for engineering, and I asked if he would have changed his major. He said one of the things he regrets is that it was just strict engineering—very applied, mathematical. He really wishes he’d had that liberal arts education of a little more culture and arts. And I got that from Duke. It wasn’t just biology; it was a really rounded experience, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
