At the age of five, I was bitten with marine biology when a crab pinched my toe. Ever since, I have sought justice by eating as many crabs as possible.

My association with the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and its predecessor, the College of Fisheries, has been 56 years in the making and has been at the center of just about every one of my major life-making decisions; I will be forever indebted to SAFS and its faculty, past and present.

I grew up fishing in the Rocky Mountains of Canada and off the coast of central California. It was when I was a dockworker and unloading fishing boats in Port San Luis, California that I realized I wanted to become more involved with the assessment and management of fisheries.

SAFS is not just about academic training, but also about working with fishers, managers, policy-makers and industry to truly understand how fisheries science works in the real world. I will be forever grateful for that opportunity.

SAFS has been a big part of my career working in shellfish and I treasure my time spent there, especially during the many years following my degree, collaborating with SAFS faculty and students. Having the pleasure of working with graduate students is a true joy in life, and I suppose I am most gratified just helping to expose them to the wonderful world of shellfish.

Growing up in Ohio next to a river, I developed an interest in fish at an early age, and—thanks to television, National Geographic, and Jacques Cousteau—a fascination with the ocean.

Although I am not an “alum” in the sense of having been a matriculated student at Fisheries, my time at UW has nevertheless been a major learning experience!

Getting to know the graduate students was an added benefit, and a number of them are still friends today. And last, but not least, I had the pleasure of working with some wonderful hard-working and dedicated staff who helped make the School hum. The staff worked hard, but we had a lot of fun too! 

I grew up in England and was fortunate enough to be awarded a six-month internship at the Fisheries Laboratory in Lowestoft while an undergraduate. This was in 1971 when David Cushing was still the Director, and many famous fisheries scientists walked the halls, including Roy Harden Jones and John Pope.  I participated in a juvenile fish survey aboard a small research vessel, which involved sampling along the south coast of England. We tied up in a different port each night and went ashore to sample the local beer. I liked the idea of doing this kind of work for a living!

I started working at SAFS (then the School of Fisheries) in 1979, seeking more stable income than the music profession afforded me. I was hired to do word processing—transcribing hand-written publications to digital files on 5-1/4” floppy disks (huh?!?) on a big, hulking, black machine that would shut down and wipe out the data if I looked at it askance; once, it even caught on fire. That wasn’t the only hazard: one time an intense storm literally blew the window to my office right off its hinges. Less dangerous, but more noxious, were the fumes coming from the basement when the food science crew were conducting their experiments. I remained undeterred by these minor hazards, as I soon came to realize SAFS was a great place to work.