Dear SMEA friends!

SMEA is humming with activities. On May 10th, we had eight outstanding thesis presentations, that featured research spanning across the entire globe, from Bangladesh, to Maine, New York, Alaska, Columbia River, and Salish Sea, examining ways to manage and respond to vastly different marine and environmental challenges, such as impacts of climate change on plankton, fisheries, large marine mammals and natural-resource dependent communities, potentials of community science to improve ocean data, and factors impacting permitting of tidal energy. The analytical methods employed varied from qualitative and quantitative analysis of data collected from published documents, with interviews or surveys, to policy analysis, eDNA metabarcoding, and collection and reflection on traditional ecological knowledge learned from elders. We had another impressive day with eleven thesis and two capstone presentations on May 17th examining coping strategies adopted by small fishing communities, Pacific offshore wind development and its impact on local communities, seaweed aquaculture, Dungeness Crab fishery, biodiversity conservation approaches, and many others. If you were unable to make it to the presentations, their recordings will be accessible on the SMEA website. After the first set of presentations in winter, these presentations conclude the two-year study of one of our largest cohorts with 36 students. Now, we are working hard to mentor our rising second-year students as they plan their next research and career steps. We are also actively preparing for the arrival of 36 students joining us in Autumn 2024. 

We are immensely grateful to the SMEA community for your engagement, support, and philanthropy. Thanks to your generosity, we were able to allocate $61,000 and offer all second-year students (now graduating), who requested funding, some support for their research, tuition, or other school expenditures. Please read Taylor Hughes’ reflection on the impact the SMEA Research Assistantship had on her studies. With additional funding from the University of Washington and the College of the Environment, we have offered four Fall 2024 incoming students full funding for one year (tuition and stipend). Over the summer, we will assess the available resources to support the rising second-year students. Thank you all so much! Your contributions make it possible for our students to come to SMEA and work with our faculty and community partners on emerging environmental and social challenges in ways that acknowledge and address environmental equity and justice. We are also grateful to have the help of Ben Johns, our new partner in the College of the Environment’s Advancement office. Please read his reflections on the role of philanthropy in marine and environmental affairs here.  

While your donations are vital for strengthening SMEA’s ability to educate future leaders in marine and environmental affairs, our alumni and friends have been supporting our students and their learning in many other ways. You partner with us in developing capstone projects, you return to SMEA to talk to current students about your careers in marine and environmental fields and invite them into your professional networks, you read about our work and re-post our important accomplishments in your social networks, and many other ways. Our community is our biggest strength! Please read our alumni news in “Washed in on the Tide” by Prof. David Fluharty. You can also read about the work of our alumni on Clean Shipping in this piece by Bryce Lewis-Smith and Kurt Ellison. This newsletter features our alumna, Prof. Leah Gerber at Arizona State University. Lastly, we asked Professor Emeritus Vlad Kaczynski to reflect on and share highlights of his illustrious career as a member of the SMEA faculty.    

SMEA faculty and staff also had a busy year. You may have read in the news about the immense additional workload and delays the introduction of the new financial system at UW has created for our staff, faculty, and researchers. I am deeply grateful for everybody’s immense patience, working numerous late nights, and the comradery that grew out of these challenges. Despite this, SMEA faculty, with the help of Berk Consulting, completed our 2024 Strategic Plan. This coming academic year, we will continue with this process and devise a detailed implementation plan to diversify our curriculum. Profs. Kelly and Klinger published a new book Between the Tides – California. In January, Prof. Sunny Jardine began her appointment as the Editor-in-Chief of the Marine Resource Economics Journal. With Prof. Patrick Christie’s editorship of the Coastal Management, SMEA now plays an even bigger role in shaping research in marine and coastal affairs. This spring, two SMEA faculty moved on in their respective careers: Dr. Cleo Woelfle-Hazard joined the University of California Cooperative Extension and Dr. Yoshitaka Ota joined University of Rhode Island. To address this gap in our faculty strength, SMEA faculty developed and submitted a hiring plan to the Dean of the College of the Environment. 

The SMEA Director’s Council has also been active. Since our last Newsletter in December, the Council organized two events. The first one provided the opportunity to about 70 of SMEA alumni, friends, students and faculty to come together during the meeting of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council. The second one was a celebration of Prof. Wooster’s legacy and his impact on the U.S. and global marine resources. The Council also initiated and supported a new SMEA Speaker series focused on marine and environmental careers working for Native American Nations and Tribes, State and local governments, NGOs and advocacy groups, U.S. Federal government, and the private sector. 

Let me conclude with a big thank you to our alumni, donors, and friends from the community who continue to support our work. Your contributions play a vital role in our efforts to recruit excellent and diverse students and support our research.  

I wish you a wonderful summer and hope to see you at our events in the next academic year. And, of course, feel free to stop by for a chat and a cup of coffee or tea.

Nives Dolšak, Director