Autumn 2012–
Winter 2013
From the Director
André Punt (Photo by M. Duke)
Dear alumni and friends:
The holidays are over, the world happily did not end, and we are into a new year. The buildings are again filled with students, staff, faculty, and friends. As always, things are a-changin’ at SAFS.
Bob Naiman, SAFS faculty member for nearly 25 years, retired at the end of 2012 (see interview). Congratulations Bob, enjoy your well-earned retirement—of course, we hope to see you around the corridors and at seminars. Nate Mantua, who has been an Associate Professor since 2006, accepted a position at the NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Santa Cruz, where he will lead the Landscape Ecology Team. This will be a new challenge for Nate, but we know he will excel. He will continue to serve on several graduate student committees and collaborate with colleagues at SAFS, the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean, and the Seattle NOAA Science Centers.
On a somber note, long-time SAFS Emeritus Professor, Dr. John Halver, passed away suddenly on 24 October 2012. Although retired for about 20 years, John continued to be very active, passionately continuing to publish papers in top journals until very recently, and serving as editor for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (he had been a member of the Academy since 1978). John will be remembered by all for his dedication to the School and to science in general. We thank John’s family for requesting that gifts in his memory be given to the John E. Halver Fellowship.
The School continues to receive numerous prestigious awards for research, teaching, and service. I was particularly delighted to hear that the School was honored last September when the Alaska Salmon Program received the Carl R. Sullivan Fisheries Conservation Award, one of the highest recognitions by the American Fisheries Society. The Alaska Salmon Program (ASP; previously the Fisheries Research Institute) was established in 1947 to facilitate better understanding of the ecology of salmon relevant to managing sustainable fisheries in Alaska. Since 1999, the program has offered the Aquatic Ecological Research in Alaska course, which enables 6 students to spend 6 weeks at the field camps in western Alaska, working with project leaders Daniel Schindler, Tom Quinn, and Ray Hilborn. Students who were involved with the ASP are well represented throughout the academic and management community. We feature the Alaska Salmon Program in this issue.
Dr. Noble Hendrix (MS 2000; PhD 2003) is our alumnus focus for this newsletter. In common with Bill Dewey who was interviewed for the Spring-Summer 2012 issue, Noble has not followed the tried-and-tested path of an academic or agency career. Rather, he is one of an increasing number of our graduates who have found positions with consulting companies, or, as in Noble’s case, in private consulting.
We are all watching events in our Nation’s capitol regarding budgets. I cannot over-emphasize the impact of large budget cuts on the major funding sources of our program. If these cuts do eventuate, the management agencies that have historically funded us will understandably need to dedicate a larger fraction of their budgets to monitoring activities and other core duties. This will impact and decrease the funds available for research at universities such as the UW. The loss of programs that fund our graduate students, such as the hugely successful NMFS–Sea Grant Population Dynamics Fellowship, will reduce the number of graduate students we can enroll, and hence the research we can do. You can help us by continuing with your generous giving, which supports our programs, helps us to create professorships to allow faculty to pursue new research directions, and provides funding for the best and brightest graduate students to join our program. Please join me in rededicating yourselves to supporting SAFS through meaningful gifts.
I have enjoyed getting to know many of you better through our many meetings, formal and informal, over the last six months and look forward to continuing to meet more of you in the coming years.
—André Punt, Director