Congress on Building Capacity for Coastal Solutions
Speaker
Biographies
Michael Beck
is a senior scientist with the Marine Initiative of The Nature Conservancy
and a research associate at the University of California Santa Cruz. His
current research for The Nature Conservancy focuses on two areas (1) marine
ecoregional planning and (2) marine policy. In marine ecoregional planning,
he works to develop methods for identifying high priority sites for marine
conservation. Beck leads or has been a team member on plans for the northern
Gulf of Mexico; Cook Inlet, AK; Puget Sound and Georgia Straits, WA &
BC; Southern California; Northeast Pacific, OR, WA, BC, AK; southeast Atlantic,
NC, SC, GA, FL; Greater & Lesser Antilles. In marine policy, he focuses
on the development of new strategies for marine conservation, such as the
leasing and ownership of submerged lands.
Margaret A. Davidson is director of NOAA's Coastal
Services Center in Charleston, SC. She served as executive director of the
South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium from 1983 to 1995. Prior to that, she
served as special counsel and assistant attorney general for the Louisiana
Department of Justice. An active participant in coastal resource management
issues since 1978, Davidson earned her juris doctor (J.D.) in natural resources
law from Louisiana State University. She later earned a master's degree
in marine policy and resource economics from the University of Rhode Island.
Davidson holds a faculty appointment at the University of Charleston and
serves on the adjunct faculties of Clemson University and the University
of South Carolina. She has focused her professional work on environmentally
sustainable aquaculture, mitigation of coastal hazards, and impacts of climate
variability on coastal resources. Davidson served as the acting assistant
administrator for NOAA's National Ocean Service from 2000 through 2002.
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Timothy Hennessey taught at the University of North
Carolina and Michigan State University before joining the Department of Political
Science at the University of Rhode Island in 1976. At URI he served as acting
director of the Center for Ocean Management Studies and as founding director
of the Public Sector Management Development Institute, a training center for
state government officials. He is a primary initiator of the cooperative
Public Administration program between URI, Providence College and Rhode
Island College, and is currently co-director of the program. He is the author
of The United States Fishing Industry and Regulatory Reform and co-author
of Making Ocean Policy. He has written extensively on the subject of
fishery management and the policy aspects of estuary governance. His teaching
interests include environmental policy and politics, administrative theory
and public policy.
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David Keeley has worked in Maine for over 25 years in
environmental management, policy development and planning with an emphasis
on coastal and estuarine issues. He directed Maine’s Coastal Management Program
for eight years. In 1989, he assisted in forming the international Gulf of
Maine Program and served as an active state representative for 15-years. In
2002 he received EPA's Environmental Merit Award and in 2003 he received NOAA's
Coastal Steward of the Year Award for his accomplishments and dedication to
ocean and coastal management.
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Ben Neal, marine programs officer at the
Island Institute in Rockland, Maine, was a commercial fisherman for six years
in Alaska, Washington, Maryland, and New England before settling on the Maine
coast. He currently is an investigator with the Northeast
Regional Cod Tagging Project, and a graduate student at the University of
New England. The Island Institute is a membership-based community
development organization focusing on the Gulf of Maine, particularly the
fifteen year-round island communities off the Maine coast. They provide services
directly to communities and through research and publications.
Michael Orbach is professor of marine affairs
and policy, and director of the Duke University Marine Laboratory and the
Coastal Environmental Management Program in the School of the Environment
at Duke University. His B.A. is in economics from the University of California
at Irvine, and his M.A. and Ph.D. are in cultural anthropology from the University
of California at San Diego. From 1976-79, he was social anthropologist and
social science advisor with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
in Washington, D.C. From 1979-82, he was associate director of the Center
for Coastal Marine Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
From 1983-93, he was professor of anthropology in the Department of Sociology
and Anthropology and senior scientist with the Institute for Coastal and Marine
Resources at East Carolina University. He joined Duke, with offices at the
Duke Marine Laboratory in Beaufort, North Carolina, in 1993. Orbach has conducted
research and has been involved in coastal and marine policy on all coasts
of the U.S. and in Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, Alaska and the
Pacific, and has published widely on social science and policy in coastal
and marine environments.
Tom Shyka is the program specialist at the Gulf of Maine
Ocean Observing System (GoMOOS). He received a B.A. in biology and environmental
science from Colby College in Maine and a M.S. in marine ecology from the
University of Maryland. He has worked at various marine laboratories in the
Caribbean and California, and as an environmental consultant in Maine. In
1998, he was awarded a John A. Knauss Marine Policy Fellowships and worked
for NOAA's National Marine Sanctuary Program. In his current position at GoMOOS,
he works with the various GoMOOS users (fishermen, commercial and recreational
mariners, scientists, resource managers, and teachers) to help design information
products that are available on the GoMOOS website. Return to Conference Homepage
Richard
Spinrad is the assistant administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) Ocean Services and Coastal Zone Management. He has
broad experience in marine science, technology, operations and policy. Spinrad
has worked in a wide range of positions in government, academia, industry
and non-governmental organizations. He is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins
University (B.A.), and earned an M.S. in physical oceanography and a Ph.D.
in marine geology from Oregon State University. As a research scientist at
Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, he developed and published concepts
critical to our understanding of the relationship between water clarity and
marine biological productivity. Spinrad served as president of Sea Tech, Incorporated,
during the development of several now-standard oceanographic sensors. He
went on to manage oceanographic research at the Office of Naval Research,
eventually becoming the division director for all of the Navy’s basic and
applied research in ocean, atmosphere and space modeling and prediction. In
1994 Spinrad became the Executive Director of the Consortium for Oceanographic
Research and Education (CORE) where he co-authored, with Admiral James D.
Watkins, "Oceans 2000: Bridging the Millennia." which served as the guiding
document for the establishment of the National Oceanographic Partnership Program
(NOPP). In 1999, Spinrad became the technical director to the Oceanographer
of the Navy.
Christophe Tulou established the Center for SeaChange
in September 2003, following his tenure as executive director of the Pew
Oceans Commission, and serves as its president. Prior to joining the Pew
Oceans Commission in late 2001, he served as president of Christophe Tulou
Associates, an environmental, natural resource, and ocean policy firm in
Washington, D.C. From March 1993 to November 1998, Tulou served as then-Delaware
Governor Tom Carper's cabinet secretary for the Department of Natural Resources
and Environmental Control. Tulou also served more than a decade in Congress
as a Sea Grant fellow, legislative director, and subcommittee staff director.
During that time, he authored legislation on coastal development, ocean dumping
of wastes, marine mammal health and stranding, hazardous substance reporting,
and low-level radioactive waste management. Return to Conference
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