Jessica Zamborain-Mason leads the Integrated Reef Fisheries Laboratory at KAUST, dedicated to advancing the sustainability of coral reef fisheries and aquatic food systems in the Kingdom and around the world. Through collaborative, data-driven research, the lab integrates environmental, ecological, social, and economic data to develop innovative tools and strategies that strengthen climate-resilient ecosystems, support sustainable fisheries, enhance food security, and foster thriving communities. 
 
Her team is currently working in three broad areas of research: 
 
1. Developing sustainable reference points for reef fisheries to assess and enhance their sustainability across diverse ecological and socio-economic contexts. 
 
2. Quantifying the linkages within socio-ecological systems—with a focus on aquatic food systems—to find scalable and implementable management solutions that balance ecosystem integrity and human needs. 
 
3. Developing and integrating cross-disciplinary data science methods to increase our predictive capacity, inference, forecasting, and understanding of marine socio-ecological systems and their role within planetary health. 
 
Working closely with local stakeholders and global partners, this work strives to provide innovative, actionable, climate-resilient solutions that sustain healthy marine ecosystems, secure people's livelihoods and nutrition, and protect the essential services healthy marine ecosystems provide to societies worldwide — now and for generations to come.