Monica is a multilingual, multidisciplinary tourism professional and a doctoral candidate in Sustainable Business at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, working on the issue of ecolodge branding. She is also the founder of Monecolodge International, a branding firm she established in 2017. Previously, Monica worked as a brand manager for Starwood Hotels & Resorts and graduated from Waterloo University with an MES degree in Tourism Geography.

She thought she was finished with academia when she got her MES, but soon recognized the need for further study so that she could deal with a long-standing and fundamental deficit in the tourism industry: the absence of robust and rigorously tested standards for judging ecolodges and ecolodge branding. Simply setting up an eco-lodge-branding business was insufficient; owners and tourists, as well as researchers, need to know what is behind the standards: their bases, credibility, their flaws, etc. Having concluded that a global assessment framework is needed, she is now identifying existing standards with the goal of tailoring them to ecolodge use and reconciling their often-competing academic and commercial priorities. When completed, the framework should be applicable worldwide.

Her current research focuses on Costa Rica, which she terms "the perfect country in which to study ecolodge branding" because of its rich market and community of registered ecolodges and commitment to sustainable businesses. Other tourist destination nations have already expressed interest in joining the Monecolodge brand and benefitting from its underlying research on creating, maintaining, measuring, and judging stainability standards. In this PhD work, she is again benefitting from the supervision of Distinguished Professor Emeritus Paul J.F. Eagles. She particularly values his wide experience in tourism management in ecolodges and insights on both academic and business points of view.