Appendix B
Committee on the Assessment and Advancement of Science in the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s Environmental Studies Program
CRAIG JOHNSON, Chair, Systematic Ecology, Bethesda, MD
BETSY BAKER, Baker Arctic Consulting, Anchorage, AK
C. SCOTT CAMERON, GeoLogical Consulting, LLC, Pacific Beach, WA
DANIEL COSTA, University of California, Santa Cruz
RICHARD MERRICK, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries (Retired), Falmouth, MA
DENISE J. REED, University of New Orleans, LA
REBECCA R. RUBIN, Marstel-Day, LLC, Fredericksburg, VA
KEVIN STOKESBURY, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, New Bedford
TRISHA KEHAULANI WATSON-SPROAT, Honua Consulting, Honolulu, HI
STAFF
EMILY TWIGG, Study Director, Ocean Studies Board
ELIZABETH COSTA, Program Assistant, Ocean Studies Board
TRENT CUMMINGS, Senior Program Assistant, Ocean Studies Board (until June 2021)
THANH NGUYEN, Financial Business Partner, Ocean Studies Board
COMMITTEE BIOGRAPHIES
Craig Johnson, Chair, is an independent contractor who helps clients comply with the requirements of the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act (Section 404), and the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act. In addition to expertise on complying
with these statutes, Mr. Johnson specializes in ecological risk assessment, cumulative impact assessment, underwater acoustics, terrestrial acoustics, compensatory mitigation in coastal and marine environments, systematic reviews, and meta-analysis. Prior to entering the consulting field, Mr. Johnson worked for the U.S. government for 35 years. When he retired, he served as the National Marine Fisheries Service’s national coordinator for interagency consultation, where he oversaw that agency’s endangered species consultation program. Prior to that he held several posts with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, including field supervisor; special assistant to the assistant secretary for fish, wildlife, and parks; endangered species division chief; fish and wildlife biologist; and biological technician. Mr. Johnson received his M.S. in natural resource management from the State University of New York, College at Cortland (1982) and a B.S. in biology from the State University of New York, College at Oswego (1977). Mr. Johnson was a former member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committee on Offshore Science and Assessment.
Betsy Baker is a global fellow at the Wilson Center Polar Institute, the principal of Baker Arctic Consulting, and a distinguished scholar at Vermont Law School. She retired in 2020 as the executive director of the North Pacific Research Board, an Alaska-based marine science funding organization focused on fisheries management and ecosystem research. Her work linking science, law, and policy began as a scientific party member for two geophysical mapping cruises of the Arctic Ocean (USCG Healy 0805 and 0905) and subsequent tenure as a visiting scholar at the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Ocean and Polar Affairs. There she coordinated the work of oceanographers, geologists, geographers, and lawyers to produce key documents in support of U.S. sovereign rights to the extended continental shelf. Building on three decades as a scholar and a professor of international environmental and ocean law, Dr. Baker currently works primarily on Arctic Ocean issues, ranging from the use of Indigenous and scientific knowledge in fisheries management to comparative offshore oil and gas regulation, and deep-sea mining. She earned her B.A. at Northwestern University, her J.D. at the University of Michigan, and her master’s and doctoral degrees in law at Christian Albrechts University in Kiel, Germany, following an Alexander von Humboldt Chancellor’s Fellowship. She recently concluded two terms as a member of the Polar Research Board of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2014–2020).
C. Scott Cameron is a petroleum geologist and the principal of GeoLogical Consulting, LLC. He retired in late 2013 as the vice president of Deepwater Exploration and Appraisal for Shell’s Upstream Americas business after 32 years with Shell companies. His expertise is in geology, exploration, development, and the business of oil and gas exploration and production. From 1999 to 2013 he led teams that found or acquired and helped develop several billion
barrels of oil equivalent in the deepwater basins of the Americas, rebuilding Shell’s deepwater portfolio. Currently, he is a consulting geologist for Deepwater Technology Services and Alpha Deepwater Services. He is a member of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG). He is a trustee associate and member of the Corporation of the AAPG Foundation and serves as a trustee of the American Geosciences Institute Foundation. He formerly served as a board member for the National Ocean Industries Association (until late 2013). He served on the Board on Earth Sciences and Resources of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine from 2015 to 2020. Since 2017, he has served on the Committee on Offshore Science and Assessment, supporting the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. He holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an M.A. from Rice University, and a B.A. from Brown University, all in geology.
Daniel Costa is the director of the Institute of Marine Sciences and a distinguished professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Dr. Costa completed a B.A. at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Cruz, followed by postdoctoral research at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. His research focuses on the ecology and physiology of marine mammals and seabirds, taking him to every continent and almost every habitat from the Galapagos to Antarctica. He has worked with a broad range of animals, including turtles, penguins, albatross, seals, sea lions, sirenians, whales, and dolphins, and has published more than 400 scientific papers. His current work is aimed at recording the movement and distribution patterns of marine mammals and seabirds in an effort to understand their habitat needs. This work is helping to identify biodiversity hotspots and the factors that create them. He has been developing tools to identify and create viable Marine Protected Areas for the conservation of highly migratory species. In addition, his research is studying the response of marine mammals to underwater sounds and developing ways to assess whether the potential disturbance may result in a population consequence. He has conducted assessments of the effect of oil spills on marine mammals through research supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Outer Continental Shelf Environmental Assessment Program and as part of the damage assessment for the Exxon Valdez oil spill. He has been very active in graduate education, having supervised 22 master’s and 30 doctoral students as well as 15 postdoctoral scholars. With Barbara Block, he co-founded the Tagging of Pacific Predators program, a multidisciplinary effort to study the movement patterns of 23 species of marine vertebrate predators in the North Pacific Ocean. He is an internationally recognized authority on the tracking of marine mammals and birds. He has served as a member of a number of international science steering committees, including the Integrated Climate and Ecosystem Dynamics program, The Census of Marine Life, Southern Ocean GLOBEC, CLIOTOP, the Southern Ocean Observing
System, and the Integrated Marine Biogeochemistry and Ecosystem Research program. Dr. Costa is a member of the Ocean Studies Board at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Richard Merrick, prior to retirement, was the director of scientific programs and the chief science advisor for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries from September 2011 until his retirement in January 2017. In this capacity, he led NOAA’s efforts to provide the science needed to support sustainable fisheries and ecosystems and to continue the country’s progress in ending overfishing, rebuilding fish populations, saving critical species, and preserving vital habitats. As the head of NOAA Fisheries’ scientific operations, Dr. Merrick directed NOAA’s six regional Fisheries Science Centers, including 30 NOAA Fisheries laboratories. He joined NOAA Fisheries in 1985 as an oceanographer at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center conducting ecological field research from then through 1997 in the Aleutian Islands, Bering Sea, and Arctic. In 1997, he transferred to the Northeast Fisheries Science Center (in Woods Hole, Massachusetts) where he initially served as the branch chief for protected species, and then as the chief of the Resource Evaluation and Assessment Division, where he directed the center’s assessment, ecological, and social-science research for fish and protected species. He has led various regional and national efforts to improve fishery and protected resources science and has broad experience in dealing with a wide variety of controversial fishery and protected species. Dr. Merrick’s education includes a Ph.D. in fisheries from the University of Washington (1995) and an M.S. in biological oceanography (1985) as well as a master’s degree in marine resource management (1983) from Oregon State University. During his tenure as the chief science advisor he worked with the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in the development of science priorities related to restoration in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon event.
Denise J. Reed is a coastal expert and research professor gratis at the University of New Orleans. Dr. Reed is internationally recognized for her expertise in coastal marsh sustainability and the role of human activities in modifying coastal systems. She has served on many boards and panels addressing the role of science in guiding coastal restoration and policy, including the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committee on Independent Scientific Review of Everglades Restoration Progress. Additionally, she has been a member of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Environmental Advisory Board and currently serves on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Science Advisory Board. Dr. Reed received her B.S. in geography from Sidney Sussex College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge.
Rebecca R. Rubin is a senior executive consultant at Marstel-Day, LLC, an environmental consulting enterprise that she founded and managed from 2002 to 2021 as an expression of her commitment to the conservation of natural resources, especially habitat and open space, energy, and water, and the resolution of issues at their intersections. She has extensive experience in program evaluation, policy analysis, and strategic planning for public- and private-sector clients. She currently serves on the boards of The Nature Conservancy of Virginia and the Virginia League of Conservation Voters. She formerly served on the Virginia Air Pollution Control Board and is the former board chair of the National Wildlife Refuge Association. Prior to founding Marstel-Day, she served as the director of the Army’s Environmental Policy Institute and before that as a member of the professional research staff at the Institute for Defense Analyses. She was a committee member on two National Research Council committees: Alternatives for Controlling the Release of Solid Materials from NuRC-Licensed Facilities, and Evaluation of the Landscape Conservation Cooperatives. Ms. Rubin has an M.A. in international security from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
Kevin Stokesbury is a professor in the Department of Fisheries Oceanography, School for Marine Science and Technology (SMAST) at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Dartmouth. His research examines the marine ecology of invertebrates and fish, their spatial distribution, population dynamics, and the impacts of fishing and energy development. For the past 20 years his work has focused on the sea scallop resource, including stock assessment, rotational fishery management strategies, growth and mortality estimates, gear development, and environmental assessment. He began using his scallop survey research to examine the habitats being considered for Windfarm development in 2012 and is now leading the examination of the before-after-control-impact studies for macro-epibenthic invertebrates in the Vineyard Wind area. Most of his research is collaborative with the fishing industries of Canada and the United States, and he was awarded the David H. Wallace Award from the National Shellfish Association (2013) and the Standard-Times Southcoast Man of the Year (2018) for his two decades of science in the public interest, and the connections he has made between fishermen and science. His research has been published in 68 scientific papers and 5 book chapters. He was the founding chair of the Department of Fisheries Oceanography at SMAST from 2005 to 2016. He serves on several International Council for the Exploration of the Sea committees, including as chair of the Scallop Assessment Working Group from 2013 to 2018, and chair of the Nephrops Benchmark Workshop in 2009. He also served on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine steering committee for Fisheries Research and Monitoring for Atlantic Offshore Development—A Workshop. He was a subject editor for Ecological Applications for 10 years and currently is on the Journal of Shellfish Research and Reviews
in Marine Fisheries and Aquaculture editorial boards. Before joining the faculty at UMass Dartmouth, Dr. Stokesbury served as an adjunct assistant professor and a co-principal investigator on the Sound Ecosystem Assessment project at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Institute of Marine Science. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. from Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada, and went on to earn his Ph.D. from Universite Laval in Quebec, Canada.
Trisha Kehaulani Watson-Sproat is the owner and the chief executive officer of Honua Consulting, the largest Hawaiian-owned cultural resource management and community planning company in Hawai‘i, which she founded in 2004. Born and raised on the Island of O‘ahu, she completed her bachelor’s degrees in sociology and American studies in 1999 at the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa, before completing her master’s degree in American studies at Washington State University, where she studied environmental justice and ecofeminism. She completed her J.D. and the Environmental Law Program at the William S. Richardson School of Law in 2003. She then earned a Ph.D. in American studies in 2008, focusing on Indigenous epistemologies in the Pacific before continuing into a career in historic preservation, community planning, and resource management. In 2017, she helped found ‘Āina Momona, an Indigenous-led community organization dedicated to restoration efforts in rural communities. She is the president of the Kalihi-Palama Culture and Arts Society, and her writings on community, culture, and conservation have appeared in numerous publications around the world. She has received multiple awards and recognitions for her community work.
