Maia Murphy-Williams

Maia Murphy-Williams is an applied conservation ecologist at The Nature Conservancy in Washington. As the science program specialist, Maia manages the day-to-day operations of the science team and supports The Nature Conservancy’s portfolio of science projects through ecological research, fieldwork, communications and partnerships. Maia focuses on ecosystems-based research, adaptive management, administration, budgets, contracts and communications among the science team and between the science team and other partners. Maia runs the Science at Home speaker series and works with the marketing and philanthropy teams to connect our science work to supporters and partners. Maia also dabbles in visual science communications through cartography, scientific infographics and multimedia presentations.

In March 2020 Maia earned her Master of Science in wildlife science and ecology at the University of Washington School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. Her thesis research examined the effects of climate change on the declining population of endemic Olympic marmot and their alpine ecosystems on the Olympic Peninsula in partnership with Olympic National Park. Maia was also involved in a variety of other wildlife projects in Olympic, most recently the mountain goat translocation project of July 2019. Maia was a member of the Vogt lab and collaborated on several projects including the Holistic Learning Collaborative, an Earth Lab-funded project seeking to develop a community participatory approach to create a foundational holistic framework to guide environmental management decision-making. In 2014, Maia earned a BA in biology with a focus in ecology, evolution and organisms from Colorado College. Her background is in ecological field research, and she has worked on several wildlife projects across a wide diversity of ecosystem types in Kenya, Tanzania, Costa Rica, the Colorado Front Range, California and Washington. Before joining The Nature Conservancy, Maia gained a wide array of environmental science work experience, including three years working for federal agencies. From 2015 to 2016, Maia spent two seasons at Olympic National Park as a biological field technician on the Olympic Fisher Project doing fisher reintroduction and non-invasive monitoring. In 2017, Maia worked for the U.S. Forest Service as the lead for a crew of 16 on the Sierra Nevada Carnivore Monitoring Program. Her research interests include landscape-scale conservation and climate change resilience within wildlife populations.