Normally I spend much of this “From the Director” celebrating the various successes, innovations, and discoveries by our School’s talented faculty, students and staff. This time, I also want to acknowledge the difficult circumstances we face. Like many of our peer institutions, SAFS and the UW are facing serious challenges: a state budget deficit, shifts in federal spending priorities, and rising personnel costs. These realities have created a budgetary “perfect storm.”

So two coastal ecologists and a quantitative environmental scientist walk into a bar ….
Nope, not a joke! It is just the School’s newest faculty getting together for a social hour. That’s right, this past academic year we successfully recruited three outstanding new faculty to our School. This newsletter edition includes a feature on Corey Garza, who arrived in September and is already building up his lab. 

[taps microphone]. Um … Hello? Hello? Is this thing on? Can you hear me SAFS community? [awkward cough].
How should one feel after being asked to serve as the 12th director of the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences? Honored to be chosen to promote and enhance the leading program of its kind? Terrified by the responsibility of preserving the School’s rich legacy? 

This will be my last “From the Director” letter as my 10-year tenure as SAFS director is drawing to a close. It has been an exciting, enjoyable, challenging, and at times exhausting decade. We have seen numerous transitions in the School’s faculty, staff, and students, resulting in major changes in research, teaching, advising, and administration.

The UW College of the Environment is pleased to announce that Professor Tim Essington has agreed to serve for a five-year term as director of the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, effective July 1, 2022. Essington is a fisheries ecologist, whose research focuses on the application of ecological knowledge to sustain fisheries and ecosystems. He has an active research program in Puget Sound examining consequences of climate change, hypoxia, and nearshore restoration on food webs, and he is also well known for his global syntheses of fish and fisheries data to reveal ecosystem responses to fishing.

It is now late summer, and the dog days seem to be behind us—even the blackberries seem to be fading away. We are starting to get ready for another academic year, with a new cohort of undergraduate and graduate students and, of course, new and ongoing challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.

As I look out of my office window, I see the first snow of 2021—a reminder to me that even with everything that is going on, there is still some normality. Enhancing SAFS through increased diversity is an ongoing priority—the importance of which has been underscored by events this past year. In this issue, learn about some of our efforts and activities to advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice in SAFS. I also encourage you to view the seminars from this year’s Bevan Series, which are focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Six months ago, I was writing to you about our new full-color printed newsletter and our preparations for the class in Alaska this summer. Well… how things have changed since then!

Welcome to 2020 and the 2nd century of the School’s history. As we embark on the first of our next 100 years, there are several changes at SAFS to report to you.

First, there are the changes to the newsletter itself: SAFS News has a new writer and editor in Dan DiNicola, our communications specialist since July 2018. Apart from his writing and editing skills, Dan is contributing to the newsletter as an accomplished photographer; look for his photos throughout this issue. The second change is easy to see: the hard copy version is now in color, which means that those of you who receive the newsletter by snail mail can see the photos as they are meant to be seen— in full color.

The six months since we published the previous issue of the newsletter have been exhilarating, exhausting, and just plain amazing as I hope you will see from these articles.