The School of Marine & Environmental Affairs will hold its next faculty meeting on Thursday, March 4, 12:00 – 1:30 pm. Please see below for details on how to join;
Zoom Online Meeting
https://washington.zoom.us/j/93110470939?pwd=NE43RnF4dWxxenFyQzIzRmN5a1d6Zz09
Phone In
1-206-337-9723
Meeting ID: 931 1047 0939
Passcode: 065631
 
 A copy of the meeting agenda can be found here. Please contact Jackie Chapman (jachap@uw.edu) for more information. 

SMEA Professor Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, at the invitation of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has become a partner in a major new grant-funded project sponsored by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. As part of the foundation’s Just Futures Initiative, “Humanities Education for Anti-racism Literacy (HEAL) in the Sciences and Medicine (STEMM). He joins co-PIs Cheryl Bauer-Armstrong (Native Education); Christy Clark-Pujara (Higher Education); Elizabeth Hennessy (Coordinator and Higher Education); R. 

Could you describe your experience in applying to and selecting a graduate program?
When I applied for graduate school, I was working as a junior acoustician with NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center. I looked at a bunch of schools and programs, and my main criteria were 1) interdisciplinary or multi-disciplinary ocean-focused program and 2) located in a coastal city. Most of my training and experience at that point was skewed toward natural science, and I had been living in kind of isolated areas for the past 6 years (college in central Pennsylvania and a 2-year research gig without a car in Highlands, NJ). 

SMEA affiliate professor Dr. Amber Himes-Cornell and alumna Kathryn (Katy) Dalton, along with co-authors Juan Francisco Lechuga Sánchez and Rebecca Metzner of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization collaborated to publish a review on the enabling conditions necessary to ensure successful establishment of territorial use rights for fisheries (TURFs). Allocating or recognizing fishing tenure rights via TURFs can lead to a wide array of social, economic, and ecological responses, both positive and negative. 

Please join us via Zoom on Thursday, March 11, 12:00-1:00pm PST when Dr. C.N.E. Corbin will be presenting “In Red, Black, and Green: The Political Ecological Eras of Oakland, California 1937-2020.”  This will be the last presentation for Winter Quarter 2021 in the SMEA Environmental Justice Speakers Series.
Dr. Corbin will share her work in examining Urban Environmental Policy and Practice and its intersection with Environmental Justice. 

The documentary short They Keep Quiet So We Make Noise was accepted to the Melbourne Short Film Festival and nominated for the Best Short Documentary Film Award. The work is the directorial debut of SMEA alum Marlena Skrobe ’20, a filmmaker and plastic pollution researcher. The film allowed Marlena to merge her research tools with her storytelling skills and her commitment to identify, expose, and help solve global environmental injustice perpetuated in global plastic recycling. 

A study by Arizona State University, the University of Washington and other institutions examined the impacts of seafood mislabeling on the marine environment, including population health, the effectiveness of fishery management, and marine habitats and ecosystems. Co-author and SMEA Professor Sunny Jardine helped to design a statistical analysis to compare the product on the label with the one that was actually consumed. 

Why did you decide to become a professor?
I love science and academia has given me an immense freedom to explore the topics that interest me. Becoming a professor has allowed me to maintain a profession driven by curiosity while modestly contributing to solving pressing problems. I feel extremely lucky for that.
What do you like most about your work?
Many things, but I mostly enjoy facing intellectual challenges in collaboration with students. 

SMEA alumni Guillermo Gomez, Samantha Farquhar, Henry Bell, Eric Laschever, and Stacy Hall collaborated on a paper exploring “a critical link between canned tuna – which is commonly fished with the aid of hundreds of thousands of Fish Aggregating Devices (FADs) drifting in the ocean – and the legal and marketing concept of Illegal, Unreported or Unregulated (IUU) fishing”. The article published in Coastal Management documents “how a transparent registration and tracking process can better align market and regulatory forces to reduce unsustainable FAD practices. 

A team of SMEA community members recently were published by Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Biological Sciences. Congratulations are in order for Ramón Gallego, former SMEA postdoc, who led this paper with Emily Jacobs-Palmer, former SMEA postdoc, and Kelly Cribari, SMEA alumna, who was the Research Assistant, as a student on this project. The paper entitled Environmental DNA metabarcoding reveals winners and users of global change in coastal waters uses DNA sequences from water samples in the Salish Sea to forecast future ecological communities.