Sierra is a PhD candidate and NSF GRFP fellow co-advised by Sarah Giddings and Mark Merrifield at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She is interested in coastal physics with a specific focus on river plumes and storm conditions. Her first chapter investigates climate-scale variability in the transport of small river plumes from Los Peñasquitos Lagoon using 105 years of daily salinity measurements from the Scripps Pier. The rest of her thesis focuses on understanding event-scale small plume dynamics using a combination of observations (from the PiNC experiment) and modeling. Sierra received her B.S. in oceanic and atmospheric sciences from UCSD in 2021. In fall of 2022, she began the applied ocean sciences program at Scripps and then joined the Giddings Lab shortly thereafter.