The 74 finalists selected for the 2022 Knauss Fellowship Program organized by NOAA and Sea Grant, were announced publicly last week, and the list includes School of Marine and Environmental Affairs alumna Alanna Greene ’21.
Finalists will be placed in federal government offices in Washington, DC beginning in February 2022. The full list of finalists and information on the fellowship can be viewed here. 

When the UW launched Husky Giving Day, a 24-hour period for Huskies everywhere to reconnect with the institution, SMEA agreed to participate primarily as a chance to touch base with recent alumni. With support from the College of the Environment’s Advancement team, SMEA Director Nives Dolšak penned an email to almost 600 recent MMA alumni.
The outreach featured an invitation to participate in Husky Giving Day, and an opportunity to reconnect with SMEA by offering to mentor or meet with prospective and current students, work with faculty as a guest presenter, offer presentations, or join in on SMEA-hosted events. 

Though the 2020-2021 academic year was heavily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, SMEA students were undeterred. This academic year, 26 students will have received their Master’s of Marine Affairs. The Class of 2021 was in a unique position to have experienced a portion of their graduate studies in-person, while turning to virtual learning in the Spring 2020 quarter.
Despite the distance imposed on SMEA students, this cohort was able to make significant contributions and maintain the academic rigor expected for the degree, all while getting creative in forging social connections. 

SMEA alumna Vice Adm. Linda L. Fagan has been nominated by the White House to be the next Vice Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard.
She currently serves as the commander of the Coast Guard Pacific Area, overseeing all Coast Guard missions from the Rocky Mountains to the waters off the East Coast of Africa. Fagan concurrently serves as commander, Defense Force West and provides Coast Guard mission support to the Department of Defense and Combatant Commanders. 

Gakushi Ishimura, a School of Marine Affairs (SMA) alumnus, was one of nine distinguished conservation researchers from around the world that were named 2021 recipients of the Pew fellowship in marine conservation. The program was created to provide support to midcareer experts seeking solutions to the challenges affecting the world’s oceans.
Gakushi will examine how fisheries and coastal communities respond to extreme events, such as natural disasters and the COVID-19 pandemic, to inform marine conservation strategies in Japan. 

They Keep Quiet So We Make Noise, the directorial debut of Marlena Skrobe ’20 has been awarded the Audience Award for Best Documentary Short for the 2021 Washington DC Environmental Film Festival. The festival, whose mission is “to advance understanding and stewardship of the environment through the power of film”, is celebrating its 29th year, and is being held virtually due to the ongoing COVID pandemic. 

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. 

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. 

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.