Karen hails from Washington, D.C., where she was a research assistant and office manager of the Marine Fish Conservation Network,a coalition of fishing associations and environmental groups that lobbies for sustainable fishery policy. To get a better handle on the life of a fisherman, Karen spent the summer of 2004 working as a deck hand on a salmon troller off the coast of Sitka, Alaska. While earning her B.A. in Natural Resources, Science, and Policy at Brandeis University, she interned at the Charles River Watershed Association and spent a summer with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service at the Big Branch National Wildlife Refuge in Lacombe, LA. At the University of Michigan Karen focused her studies on the relationship between green manufacturing processes and operational efficiencies.