Renée Whitehouse, a PhD candidate at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, grew up in Fremont, California and went to the University of California San Diego for her BA in archaeological studies and oceanographic sciences. She attended two field schools, one in Menora, Spain and one in Gotland, Sweden, where she worked in both marine and terrestrial sites. Before moving to New Zealand for her MA degree, she worked in an Egyptian museum, a historic landmark, and as an archaeological project lead in the Mojave Trails and Sand to Snow National Monuments in Southern California. After graduating with her MA in archaeology from the University of Otago in Dunedin, NZ, she lived in Alaska for a few years before working for NOAA as a hydrographic surveyor directly before coming to Hawaiʻi.