The start of the new school year is just around the corner and it won’t be long before the UW campus is buzzing with students and faculty back in class. But before we move forward into this new academic year, we wanted a chance to reflect back on SMEA’s most recent graduating class. Two recent grads, Danielle Edelman and Valerie Cleland, look back at their time at SMEA sharing their experiences, insights and take aways. 

Why did you decide to pursue a Master of Marine Affairs?
As an undergrad I studied Government and African Studies and I was originally interested in international education policy. I taught English as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Rwanda for two years and taught middle school in Austin for a few after that, and throughout that time I was becoming more and more interested in environmental issues. 

Congratulations to Zelin Chen who has been awarded a Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) Scholarship Research Program award. Zelin will apply his award towards his research into quota-based management of the Chinese red swimmer crab fishery. Red swimming crab is valuable to local fishing communities in China and plays an important role in global seafood trade. Zelin will study the perceptions of key stakeholders and review existing literature. 

SMEA Professor and Associate Director Nives Dolšak and UW Director of the Center for Environmental Politics Aseem Prakash recently wrote an article featured on The Hill titled, “Seattle’s smoky summers are becoming the new normal.” Last summer, Seattle was under a cloud of smoke for several weeks from fires that burned in the Cascade mountains and Eastern Washington. Once again, Seattle and surrounding areas find they are shrouded in smoke, this year from fires in British Columbia, Oregon and California. 

Second year graduate student Celeste Barnes-Crouse was recently interviewed by the UW Graduate School about Seattle’s ban on single-use plastic take-out containers, straws and utensils that took effect in July. In the article, Celeste discusses Seattle’s plastic straw ban and states “I think 2018 will be remembered as the year hating plastics became cool.” In 2017, Seattle hosted the first city-wide campaign, called Strawless in Seattle, to help remove single-use plastic straws from the U.S. 

Why did you decide to pursue a Master of Marine Affairs?
During my undergraduate career, I studied Marine Biology, took many lab classes, and spent my time focusing on ecological questions. I began to realize, however, that how I viewed my work as a scientist was different from how it was perceived by the public and by policymakers using the research to make decisions. 

Alumnus Wataru Tanoue graduated from the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs in 2015 and is now the Assistant Director of the International Affairs Division for the Fisheries Agency, Government of Japan. We had a chance to catch up with Wataru and hear about his job, his time at SMEA, and advice he has for current SMEA students.
Can you give us a brief description of what you do? 

A big congratulations to recent SMEA graduate Valerie Cleland who was selected as a Washington Sea Grant John A. Knauss Marine Policy Fellow for 2019. The 2019 finalists will become the 40th class of the John A. Knauss Marine Policy Fellowship program. The 66 finalists represent 30 of the 33 Sea Grant programs. For the first time Guam Sea Grant successfully recruited a Knauss fellow.  

Why did you decide to pursue a Master of Marine Affairs?
Two summers ago, while I was working on my BA in Marine Science and Environmental Science at Boston University, I had the opportunity to intern at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center (NWFSC) here in Seattle as part of my Ernest F. Hollings Scholarship. It was the summer you’re supposed to be applying to grad school if you don’t want to take any time off, and I was in a frenzy of researching programs and reading everything I could get my hands on. 

SMEA Professors Patrick Christie and David Fluharty, SMEA alumna Haley Kennard and co-authors recently published a paper in Ocean & Coastal Management titled “Policy pivot in Puget Sound: Lessons learned from marine protected areas and tribally-led estuarine restoration.” The paper’s authors examine two approaches to restore the Puget Sound basin in light of multiple drivers of change that place an accelerating squeeze on marine and coastal habitats and limit their ability to provide ecosystem services; Marine Protected Area (MPA) designation and estuary restoration (ER).