Jessica L. O'Connell - Assistant Professor

Jessica is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Marine Science at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research is centered around her passion for wetland landscape ecology and relies on interdisciplinary methods that span the fields of ecology, remote sensing, geospatial sciences, and data science.  Her goals are to create research products that facilitate landscape-scale ecosystem conservation. Jessica is a proponent of the open science philosophy and strives to conduct research that reduces the barriers to accessing scientific results and products. 
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Curriculum Vitae
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Hossein Sahour - Postdoctoral researcher

Hossein’s research interests lie in the fields of remote sensing, machine learning, and hydrology. He uses an interdisciplinary approach that takes advantage of readily available data sets and tools to address a wide range of environmental issues. Hossein completed his Ph.D. in geological and environmental sciences at Western Michigan University. His NASA-funded dissertation focused on the application of machine learning to enhance the spatial resolution of GRACE satellite data. He will be joining UTMSI in September 2020 to develop an open-source process for mapping spatiotemporal variation of depressional wetland surface water dynamics across the Prairie Pothole Region.
ResearchGate
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Kyle Runion - PhD student
​Kyle is interested in coastal resilience and in combating climate-change related stressors on wetlands. He will be joining the UTMSI in January 2021 as a PhD student in Marine Science to study landscape-scale wetland dynamics using remote sensing. Prior to joining the O'Connell Wetland Landscape Ecology Lab, he researched the beneficial use of dredge material for the purpose of wetland restoration with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and in his home state of Maryland, Kyle worked with the Chesapeake Bay Program in watershed-scale habitat restoration. He holds a M.S. degree in Marine Studies from the University of Delaware where his thesis research focused on understanding sediment transport in a recently restored tidal salt marsh and a B.S. degree in Environmental Science and Technology from the University of Maryland. Wetland research allows Kyle to combine his passions of nature and data science to promote ecosystem resilience.

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