Dr. Hazen’s research interests span oceanography and fisheries ecology to ecosystem modeling, with a focus on predator-prey dynamics and climate ready management approaches for marine ecosystems. He is currently working as part of an interdisciplinary team to use species-habitat relationships to create novel management strategies for the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem, a key component of NOAA’s Integrated Ecosystem Assessments. Elliott received his master’s in fisheries science from the University of Washington and his doctorate in ecology from Duke University in North Carolina, followed by a National Research Council fellowship with NOAA’s Environmental Research Division in Pacific Grove, California. Elliott is currently a Research Ecologist with NOAA with adjunct appointments in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station.
Dr. Briana Abrahms integrates global change biology with behavioral and spatial ecology to study the effects of environmental variability and change on vertebrate populations. By bridging theories and methods across terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, she seeks to ask and answer questions that enhance our understanding of and capacity to manage the natural world. Our work combines fieldwork, modeling, and interdisciplinary approaches, centering on three themes: Understanding the drivers of large-scale animal movements; Linking environmental processes and change to animal behavior, individual fitness, population persistence, and community dynamics; and Applying spatial and behavioral ecology to inform wildlife management and conservation.
Hannah Blondin is a NOAA Affiliate of the Southeast Fisheries Science Center through the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies located at the University of Miami. She is a research ecologist with expertise in quantitative and spatial analyses, and is particularly interested in how to leverage ecological information and data on human activities for conservation and management. She is currently studying the impacts of vessel strikes on endangered North Atlantic Right Whales along the U.S. East Coast using a variety of biologging data, novel technologies, and statistical approaches. During her Ph.D. at Stanford University, she studied human interactions with highly mobile marine species and focused primarily on billfish in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Ocean.
Heather Welch is a researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz and an affiliate of NOAA's Southwest Fisheries Science Center. Her research focuses on the intersection of big data, statistical modeling, remote sensing, and decision-support science to predict and manage species and human activities that are dynamic and space and time. Foremost in her work, she aims to produce practical methodologies and tools that can be widely applied, facilitating the applied management of our fundamentally dynamic world.