Kristi West is currently a full-time assistant professor of biology at Hawaii Pacific University and a research associate with the Marine Mammal Program at the National Museum of Natural History. Kristi received her Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2002 and was a post-doctoral fellow at the National Zoo and Natural History Museum between 2003 and 2005. Kristi’s research interests could be broadly described as those pertaining to marine mammal biology. The physiology of cetaceans, especially from a nutritional and reproductive perspective, is a focal area of interest.