Sylvia currently lives on Waiheke Island in Aotearoa New Zealand and enjoys waka ama (outrigger canoeing) and spending time in and on the ocean.  She serves as a Research Associate with the Micronesian Area Research Center at the University of Guam and is one of the co-founders of The Everyday Peace Initiative, a social enterprise supporting people and communities to build peace through data, education and research. Sylvia earned her PhD with the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Otago, Dunedin in 2017 and was the inaugural postdoctoral fellow with the Pacific Media Centre at Auckland University of Technology in 2018.