A quick update from this Sustainable Fisheries Collaborative at the midway mark in a historic summer. As waves of economic openings and closures occur across the country due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Humphries Lab remains a completely remote entity as we chug our way through research deadlines, graduate program milestones, and new opportunities.
Our group received a serious morale boost earlier this summer in the form of a sweep of research and fellowship awards secured by our lab members. Paul was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct research in the Philippines, Elle is officially a member of the next cohort of NOAA Knauss Policy Fellows, Nicky received the Boren Fellowship to do research and language immersion in Indonesia, Elaine scored both an NSF Graduate Research Fellowships Program award and a URI TNC Global Marine Initiative research award, and Annie was accepted into a PhD program at the University of Hawaii! Phew, I never get tired of listing those. It is wonderful to see the hard work of our lab members transforming into money and opportunity to do even more great work. And while many of these programs and their timelines face uncertainties in the coming year, this in no way diminishes the achievements of our crew in securing placement in them.
We call this look ‘the new normal’.
In other milestone news, Celeste published her MS thesis work constructing a dynamic energy budget model for kelp in the journal Ecological Modeling, and Elaine passed her qualifying exams and got the stamp of approval from her advisory committee on her dissertation proposal! Catie is hard at work sending off multiple manuscripts covering her first and second dissertation research chapters to scientific journals for publication. Humphries Lab alumni Dr. Evans Arizi has just begun a new position as a lecturer at the University of Cape Coast in his home country of Ghana – lucky students! Congratulations Evans!
Dr. Arizi on the new job.
Austin is back in Rhode Island after a few months based in California, and handling project coordination and grant reporting for the SecureFish and Fish Innovation Lab teams in Kenya remotely, among about a dozen other project timelines. The divers in the Humphries Lab group are now optimistically and cautiously planning our annual kelp habitat monitoring surveys with the RI Dept. of Environmental Management in Narragansett Bay.
Suki the dog, honorary lab mascot, diggin’ (probably literally) the beaches of California.
We also have some transitions slated for the end of the summer. Paul is set to remotely defend his dissertation in early August and has already departed back to his home state of California to finish up writing and prep.
And we’ve got some hello’s in addition to the goodbye’s! New PhD student Rachel Cohn will be joining us for whatever the Spring 2021 semester ends up looking like. Rachel will be affiliated with our nutrition security work in coastal Kenya and plans to craft her dissertation to look at the impact of fisheries management and nutrition access interventions on equity and livelihoods in these communities. Welcome Rachel! We’re lucky to have you aboard!
Rachel catching yellowfin in the Gulf of California.
Scuba selfie on a fieldwork excursion in Palau.
On an important and serious note, last month the Humphries Lab group released a statement on our commitment to anti-racism in response to the highly visible events of anti-Black violence and corresponding movement for racial justice occurring in our country. We stand firm in this commitment to do our part, from a place of privilege in an academic institution, to dismantle systemic oppression and discrimination against Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in our scientific and larger communities. We acknowledge our past failures to do this work with the urgency and consistently it warrants, and we acknowledge that these very words will be hollow until we pair them with action and progress. Wide sharing and re-use of the language in our statement is welcomed.
Until the next update, stay healthy, wear a face mask, elevate Black voices, and be well.
Holding onto our sanity (and/or exercising the lack of it) through game night.