Alessandra is a Ph.D. candidate in the Joint Doctoral Program in Ecology at SDSU with UC Davis and is awarded a NOAA-CESSRST Fellowship. Her research focuses on investigating the impacts of climate change on the physiology and water use efficiency of grapevines, specifically focusing on stomatal responses and how these vary across different cultivars. She believes these insights will help towards identifying drought tolerant traits for crop suitability purposes. Through her collaboration on social science projects she also seeks to better understand how winegrowers in southern California are perceiving and responding to climate change with their management practices, as well as identifying barriers towards adaptation.