Melanie McField is the coordinator of the Healthy Mesoamerican Reef Ecosystem Initiative, a collaborative international initiative that generates user-friendly tools to measure and report on the health of the Mesoamerican Reef (MAR) to improve decision-making. She has worked in this capacity for the Smithsonian Institution since March 2006. She also maintains a Senior Fellow position with WWF, assisting with conservation science projects involving the design, evaluation and monitoring of marine reserves, coral bleaching events, and the assessment of chemical contamination in reef organisms and humans. In 2001 she received her PhD in Marine Science from the University of South Florida, with assistance of the first International Society of Reef Studies (ISRS) Fellowship supporting her research exploring the role of disturbance events and the impact of management on coral reefs in Belize. She now serves on the Council of the ISRS and is involved in numerous national (Belize).and regional advisory committees.