Interests

I am Distinguished Professor of Mathematical Biology in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at UCSC and Director of the Center for Stock Assessment Research (CSTAR), which is a training program, jointly between UCSC and the NOAA Fisheries Laboratory in Santa Cruz, for students and post-doctoral colleagues so that they can learn the quantitative methods needed for ecosystem based fishery management and thus improve the sustainability of fisheries in the U.S. and world-wide. I am also Adjunct Professor in the Theoretical Ecology Group at the University of Bergen, Norway (Visit the TEG) and a Visiting Scientist at the Puget Sound Institute, Center for Urban Waters, Tacoma, WA (Visit the PSI)

In my first job out of graduate school, I worked for the Operations Evaluation Group (OEG) of the Center for Naval Analyses doing operations research for the Navy (the role model for Kelly McGillis's character in Top Gun was one of my colleagues). I moved to UC Davis in 1980 with the intention of doing OEG-style work, but with applications to fisheries and agriculture. Currently, I am broadly interested in using mathematical methods to solve problems that arise in biology (especially ecology, evolution, and behavior) and believe that we all should be working in what Donald Stokes called Pasteur's Quadrant of use-inspired basic research: where a search for fundamental understanding is motivated by an important applied problem. Stokes's book Pasteur's Quadrant. Basic Science and Technological Innovation (Brookings Institution Press 1997) is well worth reading

My research group works on a wide variety of problems but can roughly broken into

1) Quantitative Methods for Sustainable Fishery Management : We are developing the tools that will be needed to make Ecosystem Based Fishery Management (EBFM) a practicable approach for fishery management in the 21st century. Some of our recent projects include:

- The implications of climate change for southern ocean krill, their predators, and the management of krill fisheries (PhD thesis of John Wiedenmann, post-doctoral work by Kate Cresswell, and current PhD work of Kate Richerson).

- An integrated program of field work, laboratory work, and modeling to understand how water temperature and food availability affect the growth, survival, and migratory tendencies of steelhead trout, with application to water management policy in California (post-doctoral work of Will Satterthwaite and David Swank, support for graduate students Chris Simon and Anand Patil).

- A study of the evolutionary origins and fishery management implications of size dependent specific fecundity (fecundity divided by mass) in the rockfish ( Sebastes spp.) (PhD research of EJ Dick.

One of my students, Teresa Ish, was the co-founder of FishWise (Visit FishWise) and the developer of the FishWise program, which trains point of sale people in aspects of sustainable fisheries. I am a Charter Member of the Board of Directors and was Organizational Incubator/mentor and continue on the BoD. FishWise is an example of social entrepreneurship, in which the strategies and tactics of business are used to solve imporant social problems and to thus create social value. FishWise recently signed an agreement to train Safeway employees about sustainability (Press release ) There is already a spin-off from FishWise, FishChoice (Visit FishChoice) which does the same kind of work for commercial buyers of seafood, rather than consumers

With Steve Munch, NOAA Fisheries, and a team consisting of Santiago Salinas (post-doctoral scholar), Simon Brown (graduate student) and Jo Anne Siskidis (technician), I am investigating transgenerationmal thermal plasticity in a small fish. In brief this phenomenon is this: these fish have a growth rate versus temperature profile that has a peak (temperatures that are either too cold or too warm are poor for growth). If a mom experiences an off-peak temperature for a sufficiently long time, her offspring emerge with their temperature-growth rate peaking not at mom's but at the off-peak temperature that mom experienced.

2) Evolutionary Aspects of Health and Disease : For about the last decade, I have worked on problems concerning the evolutionary biology of aging and organisms with negligible senescence (the rockfish mentioned above are an excellent example). Most of this work has been done in collaboration with Mike Bonsall, University of Oxford, rather than with students or post-docs. Some of the projects that we have worked on are

-Aging in the context of life histories of organisms, particularly the evolution of mortality trajectories, including the evolutionary ecology oxidative stress and antioxidant defenses and the developmental origins of health and disease.

-The evolutionary biology of pain

-The adpative management of disease interventions (done with PhD students Bobby Gramacy, Leah Johnson, and Dan Merl)

Currently, I am interested in what might be called the evolutionary ecology of blood, and am working on questions about the bone marrow stem cell system in collaboration with Mike Bonsall. I have a long-standing interest in mosquito behavior and malaria, but am not doing work on that just now.

3) Play as a Window Into Cognitive Evolution and the Rules of the Sociality : I am co-organizer with Gordon Brughardt (University of Tennessee), Betta Palagi (Univeristy of Pisa), and Serg Pellis (University of Lethbridge) of a working group at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis ( NIMBioS, pronounced nim-bus) aimed at understanding play across the spectrum of living species. We are interested in questions such as what is the role of play in developing life history skills or providing information about the environment; how does play function for socialization; or what is the connection between play and cultural evolution? A direct link to our working group

My research group is unified by the tools we use: models (differential equations, stochastic dynamic programming and Bayesian statistical methods), experiments (either here in Santa Cruz or in collaboration with colleagues elsewhere) and field observations. We apply these ideas to a variety of systems, currently including southern ocean krill, steelhead trout, Pacific rockfish, mosquitos that are malarial vectors, and the red blood stem cell system. Although I worked for many years on insect parasitoids and tephritid fruit flies, we are not doing much with them just now.

News of the Ohana

Left Align

Recent news about current and former undergraduate (US) and graduate (GS)students, my peronsal assistant (PA), post-docs (PD) and CSTAR:

Richard Gomukiewicz (GS 1986-90) shared the 2012 Presidential Award from the American Society of Naturalists for his paper with Michaeal Barfiedl and Robert Holt for their paper on evolution in an age-structured population (American Naturalist 177:397-409)

Justin Yeakel (GS 2009-2012) has started a post-doc with Jonathan Moore at Simon Fraser University working on isotopes and food webs, July 2012

Taal Levi (GS 2007-2012) received a NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship and is working with Rick Ostfield on lyme disease, June 2012

Roxi Pourzand (US 2010-12; PA 2011-12) received the Weiss Family Scholarship in June 2012. The Weiss Family Scholarship is awarded to students who are affiliated with College Nine or College Ten and working directly with faculty within the research centers. Roxi did a brilliant undergraduate thesis working with faculty in the Water Resources Center. In July, she started as a data analyst with the SF-based company DataRaker,whose goal is to analyze large amounts of utility data (gas, water, and electric) from smart metering technologies and things such as helping the utility price their water, targeting customers in the utility for energy efficiency/conservation programs, and help the utility protect revenue by finding water/gas/electric theft.

Simone Vincenzi (Visiting PD 2009, 2010; PD 2011-13) has received an outgoing EU Marie Curie Fellowship. Simone will spend calendar years 2013 and 2014 in Santa Cruz and then 2015 in Milan. We will work together on life history of marbled trout in Slovenia, May 2012

Who-Seung Lee (GS 2008-2010, co-supervised with Neil Metcalfe and Pat Monaghan) has received the Government of Quebec Merit Postdoctoral Fellowship for International Scholars, to continue his work with Pedro Peres-Noto, April 2012

Taal Levi (current GS, co-supervised with Chris Wilmers, ENVS) received a NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship, April 2012

Will Satterthwaite (PD 2006-11) has taken a permanent job with the Fisheries Ecology Division, Southwest Fisheries Science Center, April 2012

Juan Lopez (US summer 2010 and current AMS PhD student) received a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, April 2012

Dan Merl (GS 2003-06) has joined FaceBook as a leader of their statistical analysis division, April 2012

Ole Shelton (PD 2009-2012) has taken a permanent position in Phil Levin's group at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, April 2012

Colin Meyer (US, summer 2009) has received a Churchill Scholarship to the University of Cambridge where he will undertake a one year Master's course in Applied Math and Theoretical Physics (the famous Part III of the Math Tripos), March 2012

Gia Kobara (PA 2009-2011) is now working in the HR department at Facebook, March 2012

Beth Howard (US 2000-2001) is now the reserve manager for Younger Lagoon (located at the Long Marine Lab property, and part of the UC reserve system)

Sigrunn Eliassen (GS 2003-06) is back for a year long visit (2011-12) from the University of Bergen, where she is a researcher

Holly Kindsvater (US and PA 2001-04) successfully defended her PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, September 2011

Chris Simon (PA, 2005-06) has joined the company (1010data, Sept 2011

Asaf Sadeh (GS 2008-11) received a BARD post-doctoral fellowship to work with Jay Rosenheim at Davis, Aug 2011

Katriona Shea (PD, 2000-2011) was promoted to Full Professor at Penn State. Go Lions!, Aug 2011

Amos Bouskila (GS, 1988-92) was promoted to Associate Professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and has received excellence in teaching awards in 2009, 2010, and 2011

George Heimpel (GS, 1990-95) is a Resident Fellow at the Institute of the Environment, University of Minnesota

Michael Maxwell(GS, 1989-95) received National University President's President's Professoriate Award

Suzanne Alonzo (PD, 1998-2004) received the Yale Postdoctoral Mentorship Prize for 2011 and a NSF Early CAREER Award in 2010.

Read about Suzanne's mentoring award

Valerie Brown (GS, current) received the prize for the best student poster ast the World Conference on Natural ResourceModeling, 2011

Shea Gardner (GS, 1992-95) received the 2010 Technology Transfer Award in Federal Lab Consortium’s Far West Region for developing the LawrenceLivermore Microbial Detection Array (LLMDA) and the 2010 Gold Award from LLNL Global Security Directorate for Microarray Development

Holly Kindsvater (US and PA 2001-04) received a dissertation year fellowship from the American Association of University Women, April 2011

Chris Simon (PA, 2005-06) successfully defended his Phd in Applied Mathematics and Statistics, April 2011

Mariah Boyle, Operations Manager at FishWise, has become a member of CSTAR, March 2011

Katie (nee Siegfried) Andrews (GS 2002-06) has moved to the Beaufort, NC lab of the Southeast Fisheries Science Center, Feb 2011

Juan Lopez (US, Summer 2010) received an Outstanding Achievement Award from the UC LEADS program for work he did on modeling steelhead growth

Steve Munch (PD 2002-05) has returned to Santa Cruz as a staff member at the Fisheries Ecology Division, Southwest Fisheries Science Center, NOAA Fisheries,Santa Cruz Lab, Sept 2011

Will Satterthwaite (PD 2006-2010) is now Assistant Research Applied Mathematician at UCSC, working full time on salmon at the Fisheries Ecology Division, Southwest Fisheries Science Center, NOAA Fisheries,Santa Cruz Lab, July 2011