Our Team
William J. Sydeman, Ph.D.
President & Farallon Institute Senior Scientist
Bill’s career spans nearly three decades of ecological research. Starting as an intern marine ornithologist working on the Farallon Islands in 1981, Bill spent the last 15 years as the Director of Marine Ecology at PRBO Conservation Science before establishing the Farallon Institute. Bill obtained his Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of California, Davis. Bill has conducted a number of "plankton to predator" studies in the California Current large marine ecosystem, and has written about seabirds, marine mammals and various fish species. In a recent paper, Bill described dramatic and abrupt ecosystem changes to climate variability (Sydeman et al. 2006). Bill serves on many scientific panels, notably as the Chair of the Advisory Panel for Marine Birds and Mammals for the North Pacific Marine Science Organization and Scientific Advisory Committee for implementation of the State of California’s Marine Life Protection Act. Bill has presented to state and federal policy-makers on the effects of climate change on marine ecosystems, and how to best design and use the nation’s new ocean observing systems.
Alec D. MacCall, Ph.D.
Board of Directors
A resident of Santa Cruz, California, Alec is a quantitative fisheries population biologist. Alec has studied fish and fisheries in the California Current for his entire career, first working for the California Department of Fish and Game before moving to the National Marine Fisheries Service. Currently a Senior Scientist at NOAA Fisheries, Alec has completed stock assessments for many depleted rockfish species along the west coast of the United States (MacCall 2005). Early in his career, Alec studied forage fishes and developed the theory of dynamic geography for northern anchovies.
Nathan Mantua, Ph.D.
Board of Directors
A native of Bodega Bay, California, Nate is currently a Research Professor with the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and a Research Scientist with the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Oceans (JISAO) at the University of Washington in Seattle. As a climate scientist Nate’s varied work includes collaborating on seminal studies on decadal-scale climate variability and effects of changing ocean climate on salmonid production and related ecosystem regime shifts in the North Pacific (Mantua et al. 1997, Hare and Mantua 2000). As an expert climatologist, Nate has testified before the U.S. Congress on environmental change and its effects on fish populations and fisheries.
Mike Litzow, M.Sc
Farallon Institute Scientist
Mike has conducted research in Alaskan marine ecosystems for the past twelve years. He began his career studying the implications of changing prey availability for the recovery of seabird populations harmed by the Exxon Valdez oil spill. More recently his work has focused on links between climate change and ecosystem status, with a focus on commercially important groundfish and crustacean populations. His recent papers have included documentation of climate-forced trophic oscillations in the Gulf of Alaska (Litzow and Ciannelli 2007) and the effects of retreating sea ice on the biogeography of sea-floor communities in the Bering Sea (Mueter and Litzow 2008). A resident of Alaska for fifteen years, Mike is currently in the middle of a two-year stay in Australia.
Kyra L. Mills, M.Sc.
Farallon Institute Scientist
Raised in Ecuador, Kyra received her graduate degree from the University of California Irvine, where she studied the behavior of seabirds in the inshore waters of the Galápagos Islands, including the foraging ecology of Galápagos Penquins using time-depth recorders. Kyra worked as lead biologist on the Farallon Islands, California between 1999-2001. With great interest in the concept of seabirds as indicators and predictors of forage fish populations, Kyra and collaborators (Mills et al. 2007) developed the "multivariate rockfish index" (MRI), a novel method to assess rockfish productivity in the central-northern California coastal marine environment. Kyra has also worked on seabirds as indicators of the ecosystem conditions that influence the survival of salmonids and herring during the ocean-going phase of their life cycle (Roth et al. 2007). Kyra wrote, edited, and coordinated the California Current Marine Bird Conservation Plan, an ecosystem-based approach for seabird conservation along the west coast of North America.
Julie A. Thayer, Ph.D.
Farallon Institute Scientist
Julie has worked in the California Current marine ecosystem for the past seventeen years. She did undergraduate work in Marine Biology at the University of California at Santa Cruz and Long Marine Lab, and obtained a Ph.D. in Marine Ecology from the University of California at Davis. Julie has conducted research on a variety of top marine predators and their prey in relation to ocean climate. Recently she organized a group of researchers from around the North Pacific Rim (Canada, Japan, United States) for a comparative study of forage fishes eaten by a seabird, rhinoceros auklet, focusing on spatio-temporal synchronicity in connection with local to basin-scale marine variability (Thayer et al. 2008). Julie has also led a Collaborative Fisheries Research Project in which scientific data on the diet of salmon are collected in partnership with local recreational and commercial fishers. A resident of Berkeley, California, Julie is currently on a Fulbright grant studying tropical reef food webs and development of marine reserves off the northeast coast of Brazil.
Sarah Ann Thompson, M.Sc.
Farallon Institute Scientist
Sarah Ann began her marine science career at Oregon State University, where as a research technician she conducted large-scale rocky intertidal biodiversity surveys along the entirety of the west coast of the U.S. She earned a Master of Science degree at Sonoma State University, where she studied the effects of commercial collection on the sea palm kelp, Postelsia palmaeformis (Thompson et al. 2010). At the Farallon Institute, Sarah Ann’s research focuses on Integrated Ecosystem Assessments (IEAs) as well as studies of climate effects on top predators. These studies include linking changes in seabird abundances to ocean predictors and exploring indirect pathways of predator responses to variation in upwelling. Sarah Ann also manages the Farallon Institute’s Integrated Marine Ecological Database (IMED), which encompasses dozens of physical and biological data sets for the California Current.
Jarrod A. Santora, Ph.D.
Farallon Institute Post-Doctoral Research Associate
Jarrod completed his Ph.D. in zooplankton patch dynamics and predator-prey interactions at the City University of New York, in 2007. Jarrod’s research concerns the spatial ecology of predators and prey at relatively small scales, comparative analyses of the foraging behavior of top predators relative to krill patches in the Antarctic and California Current, and management of Southern Ocean krill fisheries.
Nandita Sarkar, Ph.D. & Isaac Schroeder, Ph.D.
Affiliate Researcher & FI Post-Doctoral Research Associate
Physical oceanographers Drs. Nandita Sarkar and Isaac Schroeder have joined Farallon Institute, Isaac as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate and Nandita as an Affiliate Researcher. Housed at NOAA’s Environmental Research Division (ERD) in Pacific Grove, Isaac and Nandita are working on a variety of projects related to integrating measurements of upwelling and currents with the productivity, habitat selection and population dynamics of top predators in the California Current and Gulf of Alaska. Trained at the Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography of Old Dominion University in Virginia, both Isaac and Nandita worked on linking physical oceanography and ecosystem productivity in the Gulf of Alaska for their doctorates. Their skill sets include satellite oceanography, analysis of in situ oceanographic measurements (CTD casts, etc.), and advanced time-series statistics, including maximum entropy, spectral and wavelet analyses. They live in Monterey with their son.
Sonia D. Batten, Ph.D.
Collaborator
Sonia completed her PhD. at the University of Southampton, UK in 1994. After working with the North Atlantic Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) data set at the Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science (SAHFOS) for six years she transferred to the west coast of Canada to set up and coordinate the Pacific CPR survey. Sonia is a biological oceanographer with a focus on zooplankton and their role as indicators of the marine environment (Batten and Welch, 2004) and their place in the food chain (Batten et al. 2006). The Pacific CPR survey has completed its eighth year of sampling and in that time has collected plankton along transects totalling over 200,000 km of the north Pacific.
Michael Henry, Ph.D.
Collaborator
Mike completed his Ph.D. in phytoplankton ecology and biodiversity at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in 2005. Currently residing in Montreal, Canada, Mike’s research is focused on the macro-ecology (large-scale distribution and abundance) and interactions of phytoplankton, zooplankton, and marine birds in the North Pacific (Batten et al. 2006, Hyrenbach et al. 2007). In his current research, Mike is determining how lower trophic level diversity and production influences seabird diversity and abundance between the Gulf of Alaska, southern Bering Sea, and western Pacific gyre, and assessing the effects of climate variability and change on these North Pacific ecosystems. Since 2002, Mike has spent over 330 days at sea on the container ship M/V Skaubryn surveying seabirds and marine mammals and deploying a Continuous Plankton Recorder 3 times per year along a 7,500 km transect stretching from Victoria, British Columbia to Tokyo, Japan.
Robert Suryan, Ph.D.
Collaborator
Rob is an Assistant Research Professor at Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center and has been conducting research in the North Pacific Ocean for over 15 years. His research interests include marine ecosystem processes and their effect on foraging ecology, reproduction, and population dynamics of mid to upper trophic-level consumers, particularly seabirds (Suryan et al. 2006a). Additional investigations include satellite remote sensing applications to study atmospheric and oceanographic effects on apex predator distribution (Suryan et al. 2006b), identification of biological "hotspots", and the effects of climate change. Some of Rob’s studies also involve seabird- fishery interactions (Suryan et al. 2007).