Evans arizi

Evans graduated in August 2019 with a PhD in Biological and Environmental Science. Evans was the Humphries Lab’s very first student to receive a PhD! Clearly, Evans worked incredibly hard on his dissertation, which focused on sustainable Sardinella fisheries management in his home country of Ghana. You can read one of his manuscripts entitled, “Fishing characteristics and catch composition of the sardinella fishery in Ghana indicate urgent management is needed” in Regional Studies of Marine Science. Evans is currently back home in Ghana, reunited with family and is an Assistant Professor (Lecturer) at the University of Cape Coast. We all miss him but now have a wonderful host family on the Ghanaian coast!

Diana Beltran

Diana was in the lab for a short time working on a genomic database of coral reef fishes. Dr. Beltran received her PhD in 2015 from the University of Puerto Rico with Richard Appeldorn, studying “The Scale of Connectivity in Benthic Reef Fishes: Population Genomics of Opistognathus aurifrons”. Diana now works with Drs. Marta Gomez-Chiarri and Carlos Prada at URI using environmental DNA to better understand invasive species in Narragansett Bay, RI.

Ivy Blackmore

Ivy worked with us as a postdoctoral scholar on the Kenya Samaki Salama project focused on implementing an intervention that addresses malnutrition and its intersections with fisheries sustainability. Her research interests include better understanding rural socio-ecological interactions, subsistence food production systems, and the impact of women's collectives on livelihood security. Ivy earned her PhD from Washington University in St. Louis and a Master of Public Health at Duke University; she went to Bowdoin College for undergraduate studies. Ivy served as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Nicaragua prior to pursuing her PhD.

Paul Carvalho

Paul completed his PhD in August 2020 with the Humphries Lab. His dissertation, entitled “Potential Value of Gear-Based Management for Coral Reef Fisheries and Conservation” used a compilation of field data from Indonesia and population dynamics modeling to explore drivers and trade-offs for managing fishing gears in Indonesia. Paul led multiple field expeditions, crashed drones, and kept the stoke high on all occasions. We are proud to claim him as alumni and after a short postdoc with us, he was supposed to be off to the Philippines on a Fulbright Scholarship to study coral reef fisheries, but the Covid-19 pandemic prevented him from doing so. Paul is now a joint postdoc at University of California Santa Cruz and the U.S. National and Atmospheric Administration working on modeling salmon distributions.

Rachel Cohn

Rachel is driven by questions of food justice and social-ecological resilience, but her passion for human-ocean interactions spans the fields of fisheries sustainability, reef ecology, nutrition, education, bioregionalism, and more. For her Master of Arts in Marine Affairs (MAMA), she examined the differential equity and nutrition impacts of a fisheries intervention in coastal Kenya (Samaki Salama) through an ecological and social lens, and produced a children’s book for these families. Rachel completed her undergraduate studies at Duke University and worked as a research associate for FAO’s Illuminating Hidden Harvests project on small-scale fisheries before coming to URI.

Donna Dimarchopoulou

Donna was a postdoctoral scholar with us from 2020-2022 working on Indonesian snapper-grouper fisheries. Broadly, Donna is interested in the effects of fishing and environmental changes on marine ecosystems. Her research focuses on marine fisheries and in particular ecosystem modeling, stock assessments, marine protected areas, and the effects of fishing restrictions, as well as climate change on marine populations. While with our group, Donna also initiated a long-term collaboration between the Humphries Lab and FishBase, the largest and most comprehensive database for fishes. Together with URI undergraduate students, we have been contributing fish diet composition and maximum length data from the NW Atlantic to FishBase. Donna completed all of her prior studies at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and is now an Ocean Frontier Institute postdoctoral fellow collaborating with the Lotze and Worm labs at Dalhousie University, Canada, as well as the Pineda and Ji labs at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, USA. Her personal website is https://donnadim.com/.

Kelvin Gorospe

As a postdoc in the Humphries Lab, Kelvin contributed to many different areas of lab activity. He synthesized social and ecological data from the coral reef ecosystems of Indonesia in order to understand human impacts on fish assemblages. Kelvin also served as a collaborator and mentor on a project to develop an ecosystem model of Narragansett Bay. While he was with us he explored his interests in STEM pedagogy, developing and implementing multiple lesson plans on topics such as seafood traceability and technology in fisheries management. We are all very excited and proud that Kelvin is now AAAS Science & Policy Fellow at the U.S. Agency for International Development in Washington DC.

Annie Innes-Gold

Hard charging on everything from diving the cold waters of Narragansett Bay to mathematical modeling, Annie accomplished a great deal in her two years as an MS student in the lab. She worked on a diet study for the “climate colonizer”, the striped searobin, in Narragansett Bay, along with building the first food web model of Narragansett Bay that was published in Marine Ecology Progress Series. Her interdisciplinary thesis was entitled, “Exploring social-ecological tradeoffs in fisheries using a coupled food web and human behavior model.” We miss her dearly and hope she can host us now that she lives in Hawai’i — she is a PhD student with Elizabeth Madin studying coral reef ecology.

Lauren Josephs

Lauren was the Humphries Lab's very first graduate student! She graduated in August 2017 and completed a MS studying the role of social variables in predicting support for nature-based coastal management strategies. The work was based in Martha’s Vineyard around a living shorelines initiative with Massachusetts Audubon’s Felix Neck Sanctuary and the US Environmental Protection Agency. Her resulting publication is in the Journal of Environmental Management. She also served as a research associate for the lab from 2018-2020 and literally kept the wheels from falling off! We are sad to see her go and mourn her absence on a weekly basis. She is currently a research associate for the Coastal Resources Center at URI.

Melati Kaye

Melati graduated in May 2019 with a degree from URI’s Master of Environmental Science and Management (MESM) program. Her thesis analyzed the social-ecological impact of rabbitfish and grouper fisheries in eastern Indonesia, focusing on the Bajou community in Wakatobi. She conducted the fieldwork for this project in collaboration with Dr. Wa Iba at the University of Halu Oleo in Kendari, SE Sulawesi. Melati spent many summer (and winter) months in Wakatobi collecting data and administering a field team of 2-4 enumerators. She is currently a Fulbright Scholar conducting small-scale coral reef fisheries research in Indonesia.

Nicky Roberts

Nicky’s graduate program was caught in the Covid-19 pandemic and she displayed incredible resilience in completing it successfully! She graduated in August 2021 and did her research on value chains and food security for a small-scale fishery in Spermonde, Indonesia. Her study island had only 400 residents and she was able to visit twice before the pandemic restricted further investigation. Her work resulted in two MS thesis chapters, one focusing on the patron-client relationship in the fish value chain and the other used dietary recalls to investigate the food security of local residents and how fish contribute to healthy diets. Nicky was awarded a Boren Fellowship during her studies that would have taken her to Indonesia for a year and then a job following graduation at the U.S. Agency for International Development, but she was not able to complete it due to the pandemic.

Elaine Shen

Elaine is an interdisciplinary marine community ecologist interested in the science and politics of marine bio-monitoring. She finished her PhD in 2023 on how patterns of coral reef biodiversity and functional groups are affected by environmental and anthropogenic drivers (and methodology - including environmental DNA sampling). She also investigated what the fields of science and technology studies and political ecology offer towards more equity-centered and community-based marine conservation initiatives. The title of her dissertation was, “The social and ecological dimensions of coral reef biomonitoring.“ Learn more about Elaine and what she is currently up to on her personal website at elaineshen.info.

DIKY SUGANDA

Diky graduated in August 2018. For his MS thesis, Diky researched the community life histories and ecological effects of spatial zoning in the coral reefs of the Sunda-Banda Sea in Indonesia. This research was performed in collaboration with the World Wildlife Fund as well as the Indonesian Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries (MMAF). Diky is now back in Indonesia and working as the Directorate General of Capture Fisheries in the MMAF.

Celeste venolia

Celeste graduated in December 2019. Her MS thesis used Dynamic Energy Budget (DEB) modeling to determine the optimal growth conditions for kelp in integrated kelp aquaculture (IMTA) systems around Rhode Island. More specifically, Celeste analyzed the abiotic conditions at local study sites and how they influence the bioenergetics of kelp to create a mechanistic model. This is only the second attempt at a DEB model for autotrophs. She stayed on with us as a research associate for part of 2020 to work on coupling her kelp model with an oyster DEB model and a Regional Ocean Monitoring Systems (ROMS) model for Narragansett Bay to predict potential aquaculture production. Celeste now works with Americorps as an outdoor educator.

KATIE VIDUCIC

Katie graduated in August 2018. Her MS thesis updated and revised the reproductive parameters of the Blue Shark, including re-examining the migration routes as they relate to reproductive conditions. She conducted this work in collaboration with Dr. Lisa Natanson at NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) lab in Narragansett, RI. Her research will inform population dynamics models for the Blue Shark in the northern Atlantic Ocean. Katie is currently working at the NOAA NMFS lab in Narragansett, RI on shark ecology.

Elle Wibisono

Coming to the lab all the way from Indonesia, Elle made a huge and lasting impact on everyone as well as our lab culture! Elle’s fieldwork was across eastern Indonesia in collaboration with Dr. Peter Mous at The Nature Conservancy. She graduated in December 2020 after defending her dissertation entitled, “Characteristics and Potential Management of the Indonesian Deep-slope Demersal Fishery.” The scope and magnitude of this research was impressive and will result in concrete management suggestions for the Indonesian Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries. Elle earned a Knauss Fellowship and is spending 2021 in Washington DC in the Executive Branch and is now working for Conservation International. She has also started a personal website where her always inspiring art work can be found: fishtory.co.

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