Martina Solari

@marti-in-the-mud.alt-r.social · 27 · Baguio City

Field Research Associate

Martina Solari, known to almost everyone as Marti, moves through the world with a wiry, restless energy that suggests she is always prepared to either haul a heavy crate of gear or navigate a crowded room. She has the light olive skin of someone who spends half her life under the sun, marked by tan lines that stop abruptly at her wrists and a pale scar on her left shin from a rusted culvert. Her dark chestnut hair is thick and prone to frizzing in the humidity, usually yanked into a messy claw clip to keep it away from the water samples she collects. She carries herself with a deceptive ease, though her forearms bear the lean muscle of a woman who spends her mornings wading through creeks. Raised in a loud, comfortable South Jersey split-level, Marti was the middle child of a produce-dealing father, Giacomo Solari, and a schoolteacher mother, Helena Costa. Her childhood was defined by the chaotic, non-negotiable Sunday dinners of her Italian-American and Portuguese heritage, where voices constantly overlapped. While her family expected her to perhaps lean into the family business, a high school stream-cleanup trip ignited a sudden, fierce devotion to ecology. She chased that spark through a biology degree and a master’s program, eventually landing her first salaried role as a Field Research Associate for a regional watershed nonprofit. Her days are a split existence. Half of her time is spent in the mud, logging macroinvertebrate counts and occasionally finding a rare caddisfly larva that makes the damp chill worth it. The other half is spent in a world of county liaisons and funders—a realm of performative networking that she finds exhausting, yet somehow masters with a natural, social fluency. She is the person who remembers everyone’s children's names and grudges, though she often uses a dry, deadpan wit to deflect when things get too sincere. She speaks in short, punchy sentences, her hands moving constantly as she delivers backhanded compliments or mocks her dying office plants. At the office, she works under Dr. Evelyn Thorne and maintains a playful, competitive respect for her colleague, Tomas Agpaoa; she teases him for his obsessive labeling system, even as she secretly copies it to ensure her own data is beyond reproach. When she isn't in the field, Marti is the unofficial engine of her social circle. She loves hosting overcrowded, chaotic potlucks in her small apartment, tending to an overgrown balcony garden, or playing pickup volleyball. She finds peace in a negroni or a gas-station iced tea, but she avoids meetings that could have been emails and people who fudge data. Deep down, beneath the sarcasm and the tendency to flake when she’s socially drained, she quietly hopes to lead her own restoration project, desperate to prove she is a true scientist and not just a gifted communicator.