Month: September 2020

Melissa’s fisheries background spans across academic, governmental, and non-profit sectors. She has performed a wide variety of fisheries research projects including age and growth studies of rockfish, fishery sustainability and markets, socio-economic analyses, geo-spatial mapping and qualitative ethnographic research.Early in her career, Melissa developed a fisheries education project for Monterey Bay area youth (now run by NOAA’s Sanctuary Program), and most recently a documentary film to tell the stories of California’s commercial fishermen (www.oftheseamovie.com).

Prior to joining EDF’s team, Melissa worked for The Nature Conservancy of CA, forming collaborative partnerships with fishermen to test new co-management techniques, market-based incentives, and monitoring technologies for improved fisheries management. Melissa currently serves as Steering Committee member to the National EM Working Group and as an Advisor to the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust, a local non-profit serving the commercial fishing industry.

Ross Clark has 20 years of experience drafting and implementing California’s Nonpoint Source Control Program both as a university researcher and as state agency staff. He is currently charged with developing regional programs to improve the restoration and management of state wetland resources and implementing programs to reduce nutrient loading to Central Coast surface waters.  Ross manages a team of field scientists supporting the development and implementation of the State’s wetland monitoring program and the integration of wetland restoration activities into regional and State water quality and land use planning efforts. Since 2008 he has also been tasked with developing the City of Santa Cruz strategic plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and identify key threats from, and appropriate responses to climate change and sea level rise.

Dr. Crissy Huffard earned a PhD through UC Berkeley, conducted a postdoctoral fellowship at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), and worked for several years with Conservation International Indonesia. In 2012 she joined a team at MBARI studying deep-sea carbon sequestration at Station M--an abyssal time-series site off the California coast.

Sherry Palacios is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Marine Science at California State University, Monterey Bay. Her expertise is in using remote sensing and modeling tools for understanding water quality in estuarine and coastal systems, identifying and tracking water masses in coastal environments including river plumes and harmful algal blooms (HABs), and developing algorithms to discriminate phytoplankton functional types to understand phytoplankton biodiversity in coastal systems and inland lakes. Potential applications of her work include tracking carbon flow through ecosystems, understanding the ocean carbon budget, and monitoring for cyanobacterial HABs in drinking water systems.

She has a career total of 8-months at-sea or shore-based field-work in remote locations. Prior to CSUMB, she was a research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center where she worked on remote sensing algorithm development for next-generation hyperspectral satellite sensors. She also worked on a number of education and capacity building projects including the NASA Student Airborne Research Program (SARP), NASA DEVELOP, NASA ARSET, and the NASA Indigenous People’s Initiative. Sherry is passionate about STEM education and is on the board of Elevate Tutoring, a STEM tutoring organization helping under-served communities. She holds a B.A. in Biology with a minor in Marine Science from Smith College, a M.S. from Moss Landing Marine Laboratories with a focus on seagrass biology, and a Ph.D. in Ocean Science from the University of California, Santa Cruz with a focus on Biological Oceanography and ocean optics.

Sherry teaches Introduction to Oceanography and Biological-Physical Oceanography at CSUMB.

Sherry will talk about her current research projects, career path, opportunities with her group, and things she’s learned along the way.