.Yasmin Lucero
Yasmin Lucero grew up in the San Francisco Bay Areain sunny, urban East Oakland. At age fourteen she relocated to Humboldt County where she attended high school and participated in the Oikos Academy--a California Experimental Education Program. The Oikos Academy fostered self-directed research in Ecology and Economics by high school students. In this spirit, Ms. Lucero spent three years with the Klamath River Project, an interdisciplinary investigation of the causes for decline of Pacific Salmon in the Klamath River Basin. Later, she took these interests in Ecology with her to Bar Harbor, Maine where sheattended the College of the Atlantic (COA). At COA she completed an interdisciplinary program in Field Ecology and Environmental Public Policy, and in 1999 was awarded a Bachelor of Arts in Human Ecology. While at COA, she worked for the Island Research Center studying Coastal Seabird Ecology, and in 1997 was awarded the Lucien Caprak prize in Biology for her work on incubation behavior in Common and Arctic terns (Sterna hirundo and S. paradisiae). In 1998 she was awarded the Udall Fellowship in Environmental Public Policy. The following year she used her senior thesis
as an opportunity to fuse interests in science and policy by writing an analysis meant to elucidate the causes of scientific uncertainty in fisheries stock assessments for a policy audience. Upon graduating, Ms. Lucero spent six months with the Cranberry Isles Fishermen's Co-op (Islesford, Maine) as a field intern in the lobster fishery. She then spent two years in Seattle, Washington where she worked as a Program
Manager for the National Simulation Resource (NSR), a biomedical engineering research group at the University of Washington. While with NSR, her primary responsibilities included grant writing and fiscal management. In July 2002, she began a Ph.D. program with the Department of Ocean Science. In 2002 she received the UC Dean's Cota-Robles Fellowship and a Sea Grant/NMFS Graduate Fellowship in Population Dynamics, as well as an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Honorable Mention. Her current research interests include uncertainty in fisheries stock assessments and the long-term fisheries ecology of Pacific Sardines (Sardinops sagax).

Stephan Munch
Munch is a CSTAR postdoc currently involved in modeling compensatory growth. Dr. Munch received his PhD in August 2002 from University at Stony Brook University in New York. His dissertation work with David Conover combined field collections, laboratory experiments, and mathematical models to study the evolution of growth rate in fish from different latitudes using Atlantic silversides (Menidia menidia) as an empirical example. He developed bioenergetics models for silversides from different latitudes, demonstrating substantial interpopulation variability in model parameters. He also conducted experiments investigating the costs of rapid growth in silversides, showing that 1) there is a reduction (non linear) in swimming speed associated with rapid growth and 2) the cost of growth extends over extended periods of time &endash; fast growing fish experience significantly higher mortality despite a substantial size advantage over slow growing conspecifics. Evolution of growth rate in fishes is not solely of academic interest. Dr. Munch used silversides to empirically model the long term effects of size selective harvest. This experiment demonstrated that rapid changes in population productivity and yield can occur within as little as four generations. His MS (also from Stony Brook) examined interannual variability in the recruitment of bluefish (Pomatomus saltatrix). He has also done some consulting in ecological risk assessment while working for Applied Biomathematics of Setauket, New York.

Anand Patil

Patil grew up in and around Detroit, Michigan. From 1997 through 2001 he worked toward a B.S. in physics at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. He was awarded the Chavin Prize for outstanding senior thesis in mathematics for his work with Andrew Bernoff. He did his thesis research on the bifurcation structure of a model of fluid droplets' equilibrium interface shapes.

Patil completed an M.S. in applied mathematics at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois during the 2001-2002 school year, where he was supported by an NSF IGERT fellowship. He spent many hours searching for an application of mathematics that would do someone some good. Although the department at Northwestern was a wonderful learning environment, he decided he wanted to focus on mathematical ecology and applied to transfer to Marc Mangel's lab to do his Ph.D. work. He took a gap year before coming to Santa Cruz to travel and make sure he really thought continuing in applied math was a good idea. He attempted to apply math to the genetic epidemiology of sickle cell disease in a useful way while volunteering at an NGO called Bhasha Centre in Gujarat, India over four months. Nothing came of it, but the experience was a very timely introduction to the many serious hurdles one encounters in applying mathematical tools designed primarily for physics to human problems outside the lab.

At UCSC, Patil's primary research interest is the population epidemiology of malaria. This year, he plans to begin investigating the possible adaptive trajectories of anopheline mosquitoes in areas of widespread insecticide-treated bednet use. He hopes to do his thesis work developing mathematical techniques for early warning of malaria epidemics that are manageable within the resource and data constraints of malarious parts of the world. Right now, he is in the intermediate stages of a project with Stephan Munch on nonparametric inferences of transmission/predation functions in Lotka-Volterra type predator-prey and epidemic models. He isalso working as a GSR with Marc Mangel and Alec MacCall developing decision tools based on Bayesian time-series analysis for the managementof recovering fish stocks. Last summer, he worked with Marc Mangel on decision tools for designation of marine habitats of particular concern based on calculation of survival probabilities for local fish populations. He was supported during his first year by a UCSC dean's fellowship.

Kate Siegfried

Kate Siegfried earned her BS in Biology with a minor in Chemistry from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, NM in 2002. She completed an honors thesis entitled "DNA Isolation Methods of Ethanol-Preserved Rio Grande Silvery Minnow (Hybognathus amarus) Eggs" under the guidance of Dr. Tom Turner.  Her study marked the starting point for a comprehensive conservation genetics study of the federally endangered species ongoing in the Turner laboratory.  Ms. Siegfried worked as a research assistant in the Museum of Southwestern Biology (MSB), division of fishes (2000-2002). At the MSB, she completed the wet lab portion of the Pecos Pupfish life history project, and maintained the museum database. She also worked for the New Mexico Natural Heritage Program maintaining the New Mexico Ornithological Society sighting database (1999).

Ms. Siegfried began graduate studies in the Environmental Studies Department at UCSC in Fall 2002 with Dr. Marc Mangel as her main advisor. She is interested in elasmobranch stock assessment, fisheries ecology and bycatch policy.  She was awarded a graduate fellowship with The Nature Conservancy in January 2004 to study the fishery benefits of marine reserves.  She is also working on a Bayesian estimation technique for parameters of the commonly used von Bertalanffy growth equation with Dr. Bruno SansÌ.

Ms. Siegfried is an active member in Phi Kappa Phi, Golden Key National Honor Society, and Women in Science and Engineering (WISE).

Andi Stephens
Andi Stephens received her B.S. in Biochemistry (Summa cum Laude), from Chatham College in Pittsburgh, PA in 2000. Her minor was in Environmental Studies. Her senior thesis was a study of protein translocation performed at the University of Pittsburgh under the supervision of Jeff Brodsky. For this and other projects, she won a research award from the American Chemical Society, Pittsburgh Chapter.She began graduate studies in Ocean Sciences at UCSC in fall 2000, working with Jon Zehr on a bioinformatics project in microbial ecology. She presented this work at the ASLO summer meeting in June, 2002.

Stephens now works on fisheries/aquaculture interactions and marine disease ecology. Her thesis research is focused on the ecological effects of escaped Atlantic Salmon in the Pacific. With Alec MacCall and Teresa Ish, she is developing a method for estimating CPUE in assessments of Bocaccio and Black Rockfish stocks.

Stephens worked from 1982-1992 at the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University as a research assistant, Unix systems administrator and user services supervisor. From CMU she moved to IBM Transarc Labs, working as a member of the development team from 1992-1996 on the Open Software Foundation's Distributed Computing Environment filesystem component, DFS.

Stephens is a Phi Beta Kappa and a Beta Beta Beta, and maintains memberships in the American Geophysical Union, the American Chemical Society, and the American Society for Limnology and Oceanography. She is a 2002 Science Fellow with the Center for Informal Learning and Schools.

Nicholas Wolf
Nick Wolf was born and raised in the vicinity of Seattle, Washington, where he appreciated the weather and began studying at the University of Washington in 1990. As part of his undergraduate thesis project in Biology, he documented the previously unreported ability of Idotea wosnesenskii, a marine isopod, to match the color of its algal substrate. Mr. Wolf worked as a technician for several years in the Oceanography department before graduating in 1996 with two BS degrees, one in Oceanography and one in Biology.

Mr. Wolf then spent two years working at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle and participating in various field research projects in his spare time. In 1998, he and a botanist named Katrina were married on a Hood Canal beach at low tide.1998 also marked the beginning of his MSc work in Ron Ydenberg's lab at Simon Fraser University, near Vancouver, B.C. For his thesis project, Mr. Wolf quantified dietary preferences and intake rates of Western Sandpipers, Calidris mauri, in order to assess the foraging conditions at two alternative migratory stopover sites (mudflats) in coastal B.C. With the help of Colin Clark, Larry Dill, Dov Lank, and other local behavioral ecologists, he examined the project's theoretical underpinnings and found room for one more hypothesis to explain the observation of consistently low body fat loads among birds on sparsely populated mudflats: If foraging conditions vary in an unpredictable way over space and time, a small proportion of birds at any site will experience very low intake rates by random chance, causing them to lose weight and then switch to a new site. Under certain conditions, small sites may be numerically dominated by thin birds that were not able to find food at large sites, resulting in a weight bias similar to that observed.

Mr. Wolf moved to Santa Cruz late in 2000 when his wife began her PhD work there. Marc Mangel offered him a desk and a sequence of interesting projects to work on while he finished writing his MSc thesis, which he defended in November 2001. Mr. Wolf still occupies the same desk in the Mangel lab, but he is now employed by MRAG Americas, the Tampa (Florida) branch of a London based resource assessment firm. His current task is to write a computer model that simulates the recent population crash of Steller Sea Lions and identifies the data that needs to be collected in order to determine the causes and possible solutions of the crisis.