Dr. Jessica Renee Henkel, Director of Research Operations and Director of the RESTORE Act Center of Excellence for Louisiana (LA-COE), brings more than 15 years of research, collaborative science and planning to her role coordinating technical teams at The Water Institute.
Jessica received her master’s degree in biology from the University of New Orleans and her Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Tulane University. Her research focused on the population genetics of the Mississippi Sandhill crane and the migration ecology of shorebirds along the northern Gulf of Mexico. In 2015, she joined the Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council (RESTORE Council), an independent federal agency established following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, as part of a fellowship through the National Academies of Sciences. In 2016 Jessica joined the RESTORE Council staff where she served as the science advisor and coordinator and led the development of guidance on how over $500 million in restoration activities should be monitored and adaptively managed, led the design and building of database software to support the RESTORE Council in tracking and assessing its work, and advised on how that information could be synthesized and used to inform science-based restoration planning at watershed and regional scales.
At The Water Institute Jessica oversees Research Operations, the implementation of the $4M LA-COE granting program, and The Water Institute avian monitoring program. She also specializes in structured decision making (SDM) and is a member of the USFWS National Conservation Training Center Decision-Analysis certification program.
