One fellowship after another

An Alaska Sea Grant Community-Engaged Fellowship was only the beginning for Willow Jackson.

Five years after serving as a Community-Engaged fellow in her hometown of Kake, Jackson is midway through a two-year stint as a NOAA Coastal Resilience Fellow, working to aid Tribal climate resilience planning in Bristol Bay. It’s the latest chapter in a budding research career that began with a summer spent taking water and shellfish samples around her 550-person hometown.

“When I heard that there was this environmental ocean water quality monitoring project going on in Kake, I was just so excited because I saw it as my opportunity to work on my lands with my people and to be a part of a big research project,” she said of the 2021 fellowship. “I’m really glad that I did it because it was definitely the first step in the right direction. It paved the way for my career.” 

Jackson had finished her first year at Bellevue Community College in Washington state when she was accepted into the Alaska Sea Grant Community-Engaged Fellowship program, through which Alaskan undergrads work on research, education, and outreach projects in their home communities. Jackson co-led a team of high school students and young adults in sampling Kake’s water quality and shellfish populations as part of a multiyear monitoring project. She also helped produce the video “Ocean monitoring with the Kake Climate Partnership,” volunteered at the local Culture Camp, and mentored the project’s high school students.

The project was sponsored by the Kake Climate Partnership, a consortium of local entities and the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Preparedness (ACCAP) which supports locally-led environmental monitoring and restoration projects. The project lead was then-ACCAP postdoc Elizabeth Figus, who was impressed enough with Jackson’s capabilities that the two continue to collaborate to this day. 

“She’s just really, really highly productive and quite good at what she does, and once she learns something, she learns it,” said Figus, now a science consultant. “I’m still seeing that now in this other project that we work on together. She pops up into our meetings with three times as much productivity as I was expecting, or even thinking was possible.” 

Jackson completed a bachelor’s degree in environmental science and resource management at California State University-Channel Islands, near Los Angeles, in 2025. Along the way she completed three summer science internships, including one as part of the prestigious NOAA Hollings Undergraduate Scholarship program. 

For her current two-year NOAA Coastal Resilience Fellowship, Jackson is working with the environmental firm Adaptation International to build out the Bristol Bay Resilience Collaborative, a five-year project by the Bristol Bay Native Association (BBNA) Climate Adaptation Program to enhance climate adaptation among the BBNA’s member Tribes. Jackson, who is a Tlingit from the Taakdeintaan clan, said a major draw of the fellowship was the chance to experience and learn about Indigenous adaptation planning.

“I want to be able to take what I’m learning, go back home and implement it in my community and other Alaskan communities,” she said. “That’s what really drew me to this specific project … I want to learn from all the different folks and great knowledge holders that we have on the team about how they’re leading this work from an Indigenous perspective.”

Jackson’s official title is “Indigenous Adaptation Planning and Data Management Fellow,” a role that involves her in multiple projects. She’s creating “seven generation” climate stories for different regions of Bristol Bay, which translate complex climate projection data into stories applicable and accessible to community members. She’s developing dashboards for each BBNA Tribe to give them access to downscaled climate data. She is also helping develop data sovereignty initiatives, data sovereignty manuals for BBNA Tribes, and a regional food sovereignty map. She led a panel on food sovereignty at the National Adaptation Forum in Pittsburgh in May 2026.

“This work is about making sure that we’re informing the communities of what’s going on in their region, so that they can prepare and make adaptation decisions in their own time, and on their own terms,” she explained.

Ironically, the born-and-bred Alaskan is working from California, part of an entirely remote project team. She’s also helping Figus from afar, providing feedback and guidance for a climate adaptation plan for Kake. Figus said Jackson’s invaluable contributions have included staging a photo contest to solicit images for the plan, and working with Kake Tlingit speakers to create a Tlingit language key.  “Those are the sort of things that she is able to juggle and add to a project that is not even something she’s working on in her regular full-time job,” Figus noted. 

Jackson says her ultimate goal is to return to Alaska and continue to conduct research that helps her hometown. “I think this work is important as an Indigenous person,” she said about her current fellowship. “Our people have a really long history of practicing things in a sustainable way, and I want to continue to do that. I want to enhance those efforts, especially in my community.”