December 1, 2010

The NOAA National Sea Grant College Program has selected seven graduate students to join the group of Sea Grant/NOAA’s Fisheries Service Fellows earning doctoral degrees in either population dynamics or marine resource economics.

“NOAA established this unique graduate fellowship program in 1999, focusing on population dynamics and marine resource economics, two areas of fisheries science that are highly specialized,” said Leon Cammen, director of NOAA’s National Sea Grant College Program. “Education and recruitment of new doctoral candidates in these disciplines is important to NOAA’s Fisheries Service and to the National Sea Grant Program.”

Five students have been selected for fishery population dynamics fellowships:

• Emilius Aalto, whose doctoral work focuses on recruitment and population stability in dwarf rockfishes at the University of California Davis (California Sea Grant);

• Valerie Brown, whose doctoral work focuses on examining the robustness of assessments of West Coast salmon at the University of California Santa Cruz (California Sea Grant);

• Mark Fitchett, whose doctoral work focuses on developing an ecosystem-based modeling approach for estimating catchability and fishing capacity for the Pacific sailfish recreational fishery at the University of Miami, Rosenstiel School for Marine and Atmospheric Science (Florida Sea Grant);

• Dan Goethel, whose doctoral work focuses on developing improved assessments of yellowtail flounder populations at the University of Massachusetts, School of Marine Science and Technology, New Bedford (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sea Grant); and

• Sam Truesdell, whose doctoral work focuses on spatial dynamics of fishing fleets at the University of Maine, Orono (Maine Sea Grant).

Two students have been selected for marine resource economics fellowships:

• Geret DePiper, whose doctoral work focuses on sustainable fisheries management through incentives and design for latent effort and fishery buybacks at the University of Maryland, College Park (Maryland Sea Grant); and

• Peter Hayes, whose doctoral work focuses on understanding interactions between natural processes and cycles of human behavior and decisions in three Gulf of Maine fisheries at the University of Maine, Orono (Maine Sea Grant).

Since its inception 11 years ago, the NOAA Fisheries/Sea Grant graduate fellowship program has awarded a total of 61 fellowships. Each fellowship award is in the form of a multiyear cooperative agreement between NOAA’s Fisheries Service and the Sea Grant university or college in the amount of $38,500 per year.

For more information on the fellowship program, please visit http://www.seagrant.noaa.gov/funding/fisheriesgradfellowship.html or contact the NOAA Fisheries/Sea Grant liaison Terry Smith by email, Terry.Smith@noaa.gov.

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