Clare is a PhD student in the Olo Be Taloha lab at Columbia's Climate School. Clare studies past human and environmental interactions particularly in marine and coastal environments. Her PhD project focuses on Swahili use of coral as a building material along the eastern African coast during the 10th - 16th centuries CE. She is studying how the past harvesting of coral changed over time in different Swahili city states and how it may have affected the marine ecology of the region today. Clare's background in marine ecology and anthropology allow her to combine multiple disciplines and research methods to study Swahili coral harvesting. Her research makes use of archaeological data, SCUBA surveys of modern coral reefs, oral history, and statistical modeling.