SFOS Newsletter
Fall 2008
Featured faculty
Ginny Eckert, Fisheries Division, Juneau
by Reba Lean, UAF journalism student and fisheries minor
Editor's Note: Ginny Eckert is a new associate professor of fisheries at the SFOS Fisheries Division Juneau Center. Eckert is a specialist in shellfish biology. I asked Reba Lean to interview Dr. Eckert and write a short biography of her.
Ginny Eckert has been in Alaska for nine years now, doing and teaching what she has loved since she was little - biology. She's the "new, but not new" - in her words - addition to the UAF School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences in Juneau.
A New Jersey native, Ginny imagined herself becoming a veterinarian one day. As time went on, her love for animals continued, but her career choice changed.
Jodi Pirtle, Daniel Okamota and Ginny Eckert. Photo courtesy of Ginny Eckert.
She studied biology as an undergraduate student at Dartmouth, then obtained her master's in zoology at the University of Florida. After spending all of her early life on the East Coast, she opted for a new scene and left for California to earn her Ph.D. in ecology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She graduated in 1999.
Immediately afterwards, she came to Alaska. She started working for the University of Alaska Southeast in January, 2000. Her primary appointment was teaching marine biology at UAS, but she also had a joint appointment at the UAF School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, which is why she laughs when she says, "I'm new, but I'm not really new."
No longer working for UAS, Ginny is busy being on committees for the newly revised and expanded UAF fisheries program at UAF. She's teaching graduate students as well as undergraduateclasses for the fisheries program. (Read more about the UAF fisheries program expansion at www.sfos.uaf.edu/fisheries.)
She's excited about a National Science Foundation grant for a new interdisciplinary graduate program on marine ecosystem sustainability in the Arctic and Subarctic-- she says it has a strong connection to fisheries, but is broad enough to reach a lot of the university's science programs. (Learn more about IGERT MESAS at www.uaf.edu/mesas.)
Eckert will be moving into the new Lena Point Fisheries Facility with other members of the Juneau Ffisheries faculty. Photo by Gary Newman.
There is also a new building (at Lena Point in Juneau) that she and her colleagues are currently moving in to.
UAF is lucky to have such a hard-working scientist, and we can only hope that Ginny will have fun keeping busy down in Juneau.
Reba Lean was born and raised in Nome, Alaska. She spent her freshman year of college at the University of Oregon, but missed Alaska and decided to finish college at UAF. She is majoring in journalism with a minor in fisheries. Her interest in fisheries comes from growing up with a fisheries biologist father and a summer job as a fisheries technician. She hopes to mix both her interests of reporting and fish in her future career.
- Back to Fall 2008 Newsletter