School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences

Evi, the first child of Swiss emigrants, was born and raised in Alaska, where fish and fishing were a way of life. She spent her summers commercial fishing for salmon with her family on the Susitna Flats (between the Susitna and Little Susitna Rivers), just west of Anchorage, using set gillnets, living in a cabin precariously perched atop stilts above the intertidal flats, which served as her family’s “field station.” Evi also worked in a salmon roe cannery, where she was particularly adept at layering the top “show row” of eggs. Her continued affinities for fish, and fascination with the mysteries of microbial pathogens, lead to a double major in fisheries and microbiology at Oregon State University. She returned to her home state and worked for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, both in the field on the Yukon River, and in the lab for the Fish Pathology Section. From there, she headed off to the School of Fisheries, where she earned her MS trying to develop a peptide vaccine against a salmonid virus with the late Marsha Landolt as her committee chair. Currently, she is the principal investigator who manages the aquatic biosafety level three (BSL-3) laboratory at the USGS Western Fisheries Research Center in Seattle. Her research focuses on studying exotic and invasive fish viruses and the various stress factors that lead to disease outbreaks in aquatic animal populations.

Blake became fascinated by fish during the first week of his advanced biology class at Middleton High School, where he discovered an abandoned 60-gallon aquarium with barely an inch of mineral supersaturated, mostly evaporated water remaining after having spent 12 weeks of suffocating hot Wisconsin summer unattended. Much to his surprise, he discovered a live bluegill desperately clinging to life, having not been fed for the past three months and forced to endure water hardness similar to that found in the Dead Sea. Blake restored the aquarium to a state suitable for aquatic life, named the bluegill “Ted,” and nurtured said fish back to a healthy size and weight. Having been thoroughly impressed by the pugnacity of his pet teleost, Blake pursued a college education by earning his baccalaureate in zoology, with an emphasis on limnology and fish ecology, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Upon completion of his degree, Blake worked for a year and a half in the UW Madison Anatomy Department, where he was a technician in a lab studying the physiology of mammalian synaptic vesicles. Still longing to study fish rather than mix chemicals together in dark labs, Blake started graduate school at the School of Fisheries in the summer of 1988. He earned his MS in 1991 with the ever so urbane and erudite Jim Anderson as his committee chair, working on the impacts of anthropogenic noise on various salmon species. Towards the end of his MS project, Blake founded his own computer graphics and cartography business, which served as a career for him for about a year, and as supplementary income while he worked on his doctorate studying the spatio-temporal dynamics of an exotic saltmarsh plant species in Willapa Bay, with Si Simenstad and Ray Hilborn as his co-chairs.

Blake and Evi first met while Blake was coordinating the 4th Annual School of Fisheries Graduate Student Symposium (November 2018 will see the 29th GSS, AP), and they hit it off, given their mutual love of the outdoors and fitness, and despite the fact that Blake initially irritated Evi with his erroneous “corrections” of her Symposium abstract. They went on to get married in 1997 at the Seattle Aquarium, with none other than SAFS alum, affiliate faculty member, and internet-ordained Universal Life Church Reverend Paul Hershberger (MS, 1995; PhD, 1998) officiating. SAFS alumni Noble Hendrix (MS, 2000; PhD, 2003 and Dewayne Fox (MS, 1997) were members of the wedding party. Blake completed his doctorate in 1999 and was hired as a landscape ecologist at NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, where he has worked on projects ranging from Pacific salmon conservation to marine spatial planning and urban ecology. Blake and Evi had their first child, Geneva in 1999, followed by a second, Olin, in 2001. Geneva is now a sophomore at the University of Washington and Olin is a senior in high school. Neither has expressed any interest in the natural sciences, much less anything having to do with fish.

Dawn and Brandon met at a Hilborn lab meeting when Brandon was reporting on a recent trip to the Serengeti. With a shared excitement for travel and unplanned adventure, they have spent the last ten years working and traveling together. After Dawn earned her MS degree with QERM, they moved from Seattle to Santa Barbara, where they worked with Chris Costello and Steve Gaines at the Sustainable Fisheries Group at UCSB. Then, after moving to Idaho and working with the Nez Perce Tribe for a year, they settled in Corvallis, Oregon, where Brandon is finishing his PhD with Selina Heppell.

For Brandon, when André asked for a brief bio about how SAFS has influenced his life and career, it was not difficult to describe either. Some of his greatest friendships started at SAFS. While Ray Hilborn, André Punt, Tom Quinn, and Daniel Schindler have been incredible mentors, they have also been great friends who have provided him with plenty of personal advice and some indelible memories while working and playing. He also cannot say enough about the friendships he made with other SAFS students. Whether it was rafting with Allan Hicks (PhD, 2013), Juan Valero (MS, 2001; PhD, 2011), Trevor Branch (PhD, 2004), and Arni Magnusson (PhD, 2016) in New Zealand, or stranding Harry “Richie” Rich (MS, 2006) 10 miles up a remote river in Alaska after putting diesel in a gas outboard, these friendships have lasted almost 20 years. When he thinks of SAFS as a department, the one thing that continually comes to mind is a pedagogy that the former professor, Bob Francis, espoused—first principles. The courses are never canned programs or procedures, and the content is never just memorized. Everything is taught from the basic principles of ecology, statistics, genetics, etc. When he was stuck on a problem, SAFS provided him with the theoretical tools (ecological and quantitative) to work backwards or to move forwards. And when those tools aren’t enough, which seems to happen often, he has plenty of friends from SAFS to lean on.

Dawn feels incredibly fortunate to have landed at SAFS, working with Ray Hilborn and André Punt. With an undergraduate degree in mathematics and a strong desire to work in natural resource management, Dawn came across the QERM program and discovered exactly what she wanted to pursue. She knew very little about fisheries and had no idea how lucky she was to find SAFS, working with the best and the brightest in the field. She found the SAFS curriculum to be rigorous with clear applications, exactly what is needed to work in fisheries management. Since receiving her MS in 2009, Dawn has primarily worked with small-scale fisheries around the globe on a variety of applied research projects, including conducting assessments, developing models to address biological and human interactions, and working with local government agencies to assess and develop management plans for their coastal fisheries. Through her position at UCSB’s Sustainable Fisheries Group and now with the Nature Conservancy, Dawn continues to work on a spectrum of coastal fisheries issues internationally and in the US. Dawn thoroughly enjoys her work and the people she works with, and knows that this is all made possible through her connection to SAFS. Before her time at SAFS, she would never have known that this field and these possibilities were out there.

Brandon and Dawn would like to say that they love their jobs, but they love their daughter, Clara, and dog, Lady, and there is no comparison. They are lucky to have jobs they enjoy, and are constantly learning and challenged with new opportunities. They have SAFS to thank for the opportunity to pursue these careers. But there is not a weekend that goes by where their family is not out camping, rafting, hiking, or fishing. Their family is what they are most grateful for, and they have SAFS to thank for that, too.

Sarah and Andrew first met in Loveday Conquest’s QSCI 482 class. Statistics isn’t necessarily known for romance, so it’s not surprising that it wasn’t until the Fisheries Interdiscipinary Network of Students (FINS) transition meeting a couple of months later (Andrew was headed out, Sarah had just signed up) that they realized they liked each other. From that point on, Andy looked forward to class even more than usual (it was an excellent class) and thinks that his continued interest in statistics is a result.

Sarah studied the impacts of sea otters on sea urchins and kelp with Glenn VanBlaricom, which involved a whole lot of time underwater in the San Juan Islands. Andy spent lots of nights on a boat on Lake Washington working on the impact of largemouth and smallmouth bass on salmonids in the lake with Tom Sibley. While Andy’s MS was finished by 1996, Sarah’s took another couple of years (underwater field work is anything but fast). That timeline meant that Andy’s original idea to propose at Devil’s Tower in the middle of a Christmastime cross country trip to a new home in Wisconsin was thwarted. Instead he stayed in Seattle to work on juvenile salmon at NMFS with Phil Roni (MS, 1992; PhD, 2000), and eventually proposed the next year at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. Since Andy had stayed in Seattle a couple of years waiting for Sarah to finish, Sarah thought it was only fair that she move to Madison (Andy’s hometown) for a couple of years in return. They both got jobs working for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources – Andy as a Quantitative Fisheries Policy Analyst and Sarah as a Wildlife Damage Biologist followed by various other positions (think prairies, butterflies, and limnology – and yes, those all have very little to do with sea otters).

Fast forward a couple of years, and they decided that it was possible to both have a child and start a PhD at the same time. Questionable decision clearly, but Andy earned his PhD in Biological Sciences (Fisheries) with a minor in Statistics from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee with Michael Hansen a few years later. After another few years, Isaac (now 15) was joined by two little sisters (Nessa and Hazel, now 13 and 8). Sarah must have been a bit delirious, as she interviewed for a PhD position when Hazel was just 2 months old. But, as crazy things sometimes do, it turned out to be wonderful. There’s nothing like ten years in the workforce working with hunters and farmers who have very strong opinions about deer (but not, as you might guess, the same opinions) to remind you just how fun graduate school is. Four years later Sarah had a PhD in Forestry (focus on conservation planning, with Volker Radeloff and Anna Pidgeon) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A subsequent post doc offer in Fort Collins was too good to pass up, and Sarah is now a landscape ecologist with the US Geological Survey at the Fort Collins Science Center in Colorado’s front range. She currently juggles her time between thinking about how to balance sage-grouse conservation, oil and gas development, and a myriad of other uses across the West for the Bureau of Land Management, and trying to sneak in time outdoors hiking, and very occasionally camping, with Andy and the kids in the many really cool natural areas in Colorado. Andy taught for several semesters at Colorado State University, among other very fun things such as coaching soccer, homeschooling the kids for 6 months to help soften the cross country move, and substitute teaching K-8. He currently does a lot of neat science related to water quality in the west as the monitoring program manager for a local non-profit (Big Thompson Watershed Forum), and somehow still finds time to coach soccer, teach limnology online at Green Mountain College, and cook some amazing fish for dinner!

It has been a crazy ride since they met at the School of Fisheries (now SAFS) – you really never know where the twists and turns of life are going to take you. SAFS, and our fantastic advisors, gave us the kind of science foundation that allowed us to be flexible in both location and topic in our subsequent adventures. We’re grateful for the fun times we had at SAFS and the amazing education we received there, including, of course, the stats course that started it all!

“How do a Japanese guy and a French girl end up in the US?” This might have been the question we were asked the most when we lived in Seattle. We actually met in grad school in France. Although Kotaro is Japanese, he grew up in Africa going to French schools. He then moved to France for higher education and that’s where we met. Our first introduction to SAFS was during internships in summer 2006. Kotaro found an internship first in the WET team led by Charles “Si” Simenstad. I thought it would be fun to follow him for the summer. So I started emailing Kerry Naish, and managed to convince her to host me for the summer. The goal for both of us was to get hands-on research experience and to decide whether we would like to pursue this type of career. Arriving in Seattle, Kotaro was convinced he wanted to obtain a PhD; I was convinced research was not for me at all!

That four-week internship changed our lives! Kotaro assisted Emily Howe (MS, 2006; PhD, 2012) with lab and field work in Padilla Bay. I worked with Kristi Straus (PhD, 2010) to assess the population structure of pinto abalone and was lucky to go to Mukilteo almost weekly for wet lab work. During our short internships, we quickly became part of the SAFS family and started what would become lifelong friendships. We loved the work environment so much, science and people alike, that we decided to come back to Seattle in September 2007. I started a PhD with Kerry Naish in population genomics and Kotaro a (second) MS with Si, followed by a PhD in quantitative fishery science with Ray Hilborn. We really enjoyed working at SAFS so much that we each did a post-doc there as well! Our four-week internship lead to nine years at SAFS!

SAFS is an amazing place to do science because of all of its great scientists, but also because of the alumni and the agencies and research institutes nearby with whom collaborations are numerous. Beyond the science, SAFS is an amazing community. We had such a great time during TGITs, intramural softball games, SAFS picnics, holiday parties and latte carts, and the wine club.

Our friends at SAFS were our family away from home. So much so that a large delegation of SAFS folks came to our wedding in France in 2011. We were also very lucky to have them around us when our son Paul was born in 2015. It takes a village to raise a child, and in our case, that village is our SAFS family.

We moved to Norway in December 2016 to do research there. I have a postdoc on population genomics of Atlantic cod at the University of Oslo, and Kotaro has a postdoc on quantitative ecology at the University of Agder. We have since welcomed a new addition, Emma, in January 2018. Although we love living in Norway, SAFS will always be the place where we received the scientific foundations for our careers and also the place that made us the people we are today.

I grew up expecting to attend the University of Washington as had nearly all of my close relatives (my maternal grandmother graduated in 1909.) I applied to the College of Fisheries at the suggestion of Dixy Lee Ray (high school friend of my mother) and started in fall 1965 with the intent of becoming a marine biologist. The freshman class had over 100 students, of which possibly two were females, and it included SAFS own Charles “Si” Simenstad! While most classmates had interests in salmon and fish, I did not. I chose the fisheries science curriculum as it was intended for those planning graduate work, which consisted of a broad range of science classes from across the University and fewer fisheries courses.

When I was a freshman, my lack of good study habitats quickly rose up. My advisor Al Sparks sat me down and said, “If you don’t buckle down and get better grades, you will have to drop the fisheries science curriculum and go into fisheries management.” I buckled down. Don Bevan’s class in Basic programming taught a life’s lesson on the need to pay close attention to details, as mistypes on IBM punch cards could lead to hours of walking back and forth to the computer center on upper campus. Doug Chapman’s fisheries statistics classes made me want to focus on real animals as I disliked ANOVA and ANCOVA analyses. The most exciting “aha” moment in my undergrad education occurred in laboratory experiments we conducted, where we followed growth from fertilization of eggs (chickens and newts) to hatching or birth through all stages of embryo development.

In spring of my senior year, Ken Chew introduced me to field research by setting me up with Terry Nosho for a project on Manila clams at Big Beef Creek. I graduated in 1969 with a BS in Fisheries, and Ken then arranged a summer job for me at the Washington Department of Fisheries (WDF) Brinnon Shellfish Laboratory on Hood Canal. He also offered me a teaching assistant position for his classes the following year if I went to graduate school. However, Uncle Sam had other ideas. During the spring, I received a notice to take a draft physical. Not wanting to go into the Army and likely Viet Nam after graduation, I joined the US Coast Guard and served as a line officer for three years.

I returned to the College of Fisheries in Winter 1973 to start graduate school, but dropped out after six weeks. Ken arranged another job for me at the WDF Brinnon lab for the summer, at which time I started some research on the Dungeness crab sport fishery. By fall 1973, I was back in school, and over the next several years most of my graduate coursework was in invertebrate zoology and ecology from the Zoology and Oceanography departments—with a few Center for Quantitative Sciences classes and a fisheries course on disease taught by new faculty member Marsha Landolt. Gil Pauley had just joined the Washington Cooperative Fishery Research Unit and Dick Whitney assigned him as my thesis advisor, with Ken Chew as a committee member. While I had high visions of what I could obtain from my research, my committee suggested a toned-down thesis that was feasible. I analyzed data collected in 1973–1974 and submitted a MS thesis at the end of spring quarter 1975.

In fall 1975, I started on a PhD program to study natural settlement of Manila clam larvae and subsequent growth with Ken Chew as my advisor. Ken arranged with Justin Taylor (head of Taylor shellfish) to let me conduct research at a commercial clam bed in south Puget Sound. With no assurance of funding other than the GI Bill, I structured a dissertation that I could finish in several years. Fortuitously, however, Ken offered me the TA position for his mollusk and crustacean courses, which I then taught through winter 1978. Additionally in spring 1976, Randy Hansen offered me a TA position for his fishery methodology course that exposed students to field exercises using a variety of sampling gears. I had the best office location of my adult life from 1976–1978—the space now occupied by Aqua Verde!! As one might expect in a Ken Chew class, where appropriate, at the end of a lab session, we would cook and eat examples of what we had just studied. The best annual field trip was on the RV Commando each winter when we “sampled” shrimp populations in Hood Canal. I submitted my dissertation by the end of spring quarter 1978. As I was leaving the UW, David Armstrong, the new crustacean professor, asked if he could use the lab manual I had written. Sure! He subsequently collected a few dollars from each student and gave me $50 with the admonition, “Buy, wine!” To this day, I have religiously followed his advice.

I did not find a university position in marine biology within the one and one-half years I allotted to the effort. In order to stay in the Pacific Northwest, I broadened my search and secured a temporary job in early 1980 at the Northwest and Alaska Fisheries Science Center at Montlake, ironically in salmon research on the Columbia River—neither invertebrates nor marine! I was submersed in hydraulic engineering issues while working in my first permanent US government job, dealing with salmon passage at Columbia River dams and while working in Portland for the US Army Corps of Engineers. I returned to NMFS at Montlake in 1987 and worked there on Columbia River salmon issues until my retirement in December 2010. I owe success in my career in part to the formal coursework in fisheries and statistics I took as an undergrad and grad student at the UW, but also to the interactions with other fisheries students while in graduate school. Most were studying and researching areas quite different from mine and our interactions and discussions about research provided me a broad-based knowledge of fisheries research and science.

In 1989, I began collaborating with Jim Anderson, and concurrently became a SAFS affiliate assistant professor. I provided funding for graduate students for the next 20 years, served on several graduate student committees, and provided informal mentoring to other graduate students in SAFS, and was promoted to full affiliate professor in 2010. Much of the mentoring I have provided to students has been based on mentoring I received while in graduate school, reinforced by experience guiding a large NOAA Fisheries research team.

A summary of some of this advice:

• From Gil Pauley: “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth publishing.”
• From Paul Illg: “Write to publish.”
• From Peter Jumars: “Read ‘Strong Inference’ by JR Platt (1964 in Science) annually.”
• Dick Whitney: “Give us people who can communicate effectively in writing and speech; we can teach them everything else they will need to know!”
• John Williams: “Go to graduate school to learn how to, and show that you can, develop, conduct, and communicate research results. Don’t expect to conduct research that will win a Nobel Prize. Don’t spend needless years in graduate school. Get out and get a job where you will get paid well for your abilities. Employers seldom hire someone just based on their dissertation.”

I almost didn’t make it as a biology major. During my junior year in Ecology and Evolutionary biology at UC San Diego, I realized I wasn’t very good at field work when a couple of graduate students I was volunteering for fired me. Twice. Fortunately I was saved by some ecological modeling classes that I was taking at the time from Mike Gilpin. I loved the problem-solving aspects and complexity of the computer models we built – and also realized this could be a great career path. I continued to pursue mathematical ecology with an M.Sc. with Dan Goodman at Montana State University, where I was exposed to a lot of statistics – including Bayesian methods and state space models.

I came to SAFS in the fall of 2003 and received a NMFS Population Dynamics fellowship to work with Ray Hilborn. The fellowship was pretty new, and competition for it was not as fierce as it is today. As an incoming PhD student, I benefitted from having a great cohort of incoming SAFS students and a number of more senior graduate students in the Hilborn lab (Trevor Branch [PhD, 2004], Ian Stewart [MS, 2001; PhD, 2006], Caroline Minte-Vera [PhD, 2004]). Sharing an office with Peter Westley (MS, 2007) and Arni Magnusson (MS, 2002; PhD, 2016) also exposed me to the culinary diversity among SAFS students (Arni had on occasional sheepshead for lunch, and in summer field camps Peter had an affinity for Spam). One of the highlights during my time in the Hilborn lab was getting to go to New Zealand with Ray in 2004 to learn more about stock assessments. In addition to Ray, Tim Essington and André Punt were on my PhD committee and were a huge help to my maturation as a scientist. I’d also be remiss in not giving SAFS credit for radically changing my personal life, because I met my wife Kristin Marshall (MS, 2007) during CPR training in 2003.

I did a post-doc at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center (NWFSC) in 2007–2008; part of a productive post-doc experience for me was having other post-docs around to collaborate with, and I was fortunate to overlap with some other recent UW graduates, including Jon Moore and Brice Semmens. I was lucky to be hired as a statistician at the NWFSC in fall 2008, basically as the US economy was imploding. My job is split between multiple programs in the Conservation Biology division, but also allows me to work on many other collaborative projects across divisions, particularly in tool development. I’ve gotten to work on many types of data sets and species, ranging from plankton to top predators. I also have several projects with external collaborators, including several SAFS faculty and students.

For most of my time at the NWFSC, I’ve been fortunate to be affiliate faculty at SAFS. I’ve taught a class on time series with Eli Holmes and Mark Scheuerell (also both SAFS affiliate faculty), and I serve on student committees. These interactions with students are extremely rewarding because they let me keep up with all the exciting research SAFS students are doing. Since I graduated in 2006, SAFS has changed a lot, with many new faces and ideas. I have no doubt SAFS will remain the best quantitative fisheries program in the world, and I’m excited to watch the evolution of the SAFS community into the future.

I never thought I would be a student at the age of 39, but there I was in Tom Quinn’s office discussing what classes to take for the fall of 2004 at SAFS. I quickly realized after having met several of my cohorts that I was by far one of the older students if not the oldest. My guess at the time was about 10 to 15 years older than most. I thought to myself,“is this what I should be doing?” I already had a full-time job at NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center, and a family with two kids (at the time, ages 5 and 2).  Slightly overwhelmed was the definite feeling at the time.

My entire professional career, up to this point, pointed me towards SAFS. Growing up on the shores of Long Island Sound solidified my love and passion for all things aquatic and fish. Whether it was surf casting for bluefish and striped bass or learning how to fly fish for salmon and steelhead once I moved to the Pacific Northwest back in early 1990s, I could not satiate my desire to understand freshwater and marine ecosystems. My work is very much fish habitat oriented, but I was and still am in awe of the salmon life cycle and how these animals sustain across the Pacific Rim. How salmon colonized new habitats seemed to me the most important question I could pursue, and Tom was willing to work with me on this pursuit.

After starting the program at SAFS, it quickly became apparent that while the program was known for their excellent professors who helped me throughout this journey, including Tom Quinn, Daniel Schindler, Ray Hilborn, and Loveday Conquest, it was the students that truly make SAFS a special place. The individuals I met at the time included Jon Moore (PhD, Zoology, 2006), Peter Westley (MS, 2007), Donna Hauser (BS, 2002; MS, 2006; PhD, 2016), Neala Kendall (MS, 2007; PhD, 2011), Todd Seamons (PhD, 2005), Thomas Buehrens (MS, 2011), Joe Anderson (MS, 2006), Keith Denton (MS, 2008), Sue Johnson (PhD, 2011), Lauren Rogers (PhD, 2010), Stephanie Carlson (PhD, 2006), Harry Rich (MS, 2006), Chris Boatright (MS, 2003), Jackie Carter (MS, 2010), Jonny Armstrong (PhD, 2012), Gordon Holtgrieve (PhD, 2009), Matt Baker (PhD, 2011), and Tessa Francis (PhD, 2009) are all incredible people, and I was fortunate to know and work with them. My daughters Samantha and Olivia grew up with these people; some even babysat our girls. Many of these former students and faculty are still part of my life as friends and peers. Now I can tell stories in which my daughters babysat their children. And recently, my oldest, Samantha, was able to experience the wonders of Alaska as part of the Alaska Salmon Program, thanks to Daniel Schindler.

I am part of SAFS as an affiliate assistant professor, and I really cannot think of a better way to continue my connection. I am grateful for what I learned while a student at SAFS because I continue to apply it to my work on the Elwha dam removal. Thank you SAFS, and I hope to contribute a small portion of what I have gained over the last 14 years.