Co-founder and Chief Scientist
I’m a marine conservation biologist and along with Erin Ashe, co-founded Oceans Initiative. Some happy accidents led me to studying whales in 1995, and although my work occasionally veers toward salmon, sharks or sunfish, most of my research involves whales and whale conservation. Marine conservation biology allows me to marry creative science to a good cause. It combines my love of travel, science and math, and the ocean and the animals that live in it. I like identifying gaps that affect our ability to protect marine wildlife, and developing pragmatic ways to fill in those gaps cheaply and well.
I enjoy building connections between ideas and people. A lot of my time is spent sharing findings in the scientific literature. My work is finding a niche: I have served on the editorial boards of BioScience, Animal Conservation, and Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation; have been a member of the Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission since 2000; was the Canada-US Fulbright Chair at the University of Washington (Seattle, 2009-10); was a Marie Curie Research Fellow (University of St Andrews, Scotland, 2010-2012), and a Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation (2015-2018).
