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SFOS Newsletter
Fall 2008

STANDOUTS Faculty and Staff News

•The new Sant Ocean Hall in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., features a display highlighting the work and photographs of Bodil Bluhm, Rolf Gradinger, Katrin Iken and Russ Hopcroft.

•Murat Balaban was a keynote speaker at the First International Congress of Seafood Technology meeting in Turkey earlier this year. Balaban is also helping organize the next ICST meeting, which will be held in Anchorage in 2010.

•Keith Criddle chaired a National Research Council committee formed by Congress to investigate marine debris in the world's oceans. The committee's findings and Criddle's comments were published in articles by CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Times, the Los Angeles Times and TIME magazine. Gary Freitag, the new Marine Advisory Program agent in Ketchikan, helped release a humpback whale entangled in a fisherman's gillnet near Metlakatla in late August. The Alaska Ocean Observing System provided financial support for a new children';s book, Pete Puffin's Wild Ride: Cruising Alaska's Currents, published by Alaska Geographic. Oceanographer Mark Johnson leads AOOS' data management team in Fairbanks. Tom Weingartner reviewed a draft of the book.

•Tuula Hollmen, Alan Springer, Shannon Atkinson, Markus Horning and Russel Andrews helped organize and present their research on Alaska seabirds and pinnipeds at the Alaska SeaLife Center Annual Research Colloquium in Seward in September.

•Jeremy Mathis presented a talk called "Increased CO2 uptake in the Arctic Ocean: How sea ice loss will impact ocean acidification" at the Ocean in a High CO2 World Meeting in Monaco in early October.

•One of Russ Hopcroft's photographs is being used by the Australian government for one of its postage stamps celebrating International Polar Year.

•Gordon Kruse is headed to Germany in November as the the convenor of a symposium on "Rebuilding depleted fish stocks: Biology, ecology, social science and management strategies" for the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. Kruse is also chairman of the Fishery Science Committee for the North Pacific Marine Science Organization (PICES).

•Phyllis Shoemaker accompanied this year's first- and second-place teams from the 2008 National Ocean Sciences Bowl competition on an educational, all expenses paid trip to Costa Rica this summer.

•SFOS faculty members have received nearly $3 million from the National Science Foundation to develop an Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program at UAF. This interdisciplinary graduate program will provide training in marine ecosystem sustainability in the Arctic and Subarctic (MESAS). The leading PIs are Bill Smoker, Gordon Kruse, Keith Criddle and Tom Weingartner. Ginny Eckert is directing the implementation of the project. You can learn more at www.uaf.edu/mesas.

•Alexandra de Oliveira helped organize a salmon taste test at the Wood Center in Fairbanks with graduate student Trina Lapis. 120 volunteers sampled canned salmon as part of Oliveira's and Lapis' research project on the taste and nutritional value of pink salmon.

These sea stars and other creatures were collected from the Chukchi Sea shelf near the Canadian Basic. Photo by Bodil Bluhm.

•A Fairbanks artist, Susan Farnham, was so inspired by the arctic research and photographs of Rolf Gradinger, Bodil Bluhm, Russ Hopcroft and graduate student Shawn Harper she created a series of paintings based on their work. The paintings, and the scientists' photographs, were included in an art exhibit in Fairbanks in September.