Blue Ocean Institute

Programs:

Blue Ocean Fellows

We’ve created a Fellows Program to bring new people with established reputations and recognized voices into the Blue Ocean ark. Blue Ocean Fellows are a few accomplished and innovative artists, authors, chefs and scientists. They will develop and articulate ideas that advance a much larger, and deeper, conservation discussion.

“Blue Ocean Fellows will boost our ability to be a thought-leading group, small in size and big in influence,” says Institute founder, Carl Safina.

Working independently but inter-dependently as well, Blue Ocean Fellows will create articles, opinion pieces, videos, tutorials and other materials, greatly expanding our reach.

We’re very excited to welcome our first three Blue Ocean Fellows: author and essayist Paul Greenberg and shark experts Dr. Demian Chapman and Debra Abercrombie.

Click here for recent articles by Blue Ocean Fellows.

Photo by Laura Strauss.

Paul Greenberg is the author of the James Beard Award-winning New York Times bestseller Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food and other books, and a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine, New York Times Sunday Book Review and the New York Times Opinion page. He has also written for National Geographic, GQ, The Times of London, Vogue and many other publications. In the last five years, he has been both a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow and a W. K. Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Policy Fellow.A guest and commentator on national public radio programs including “Fresh Air” and “All Things Considered,” Mr. Greenberg is also a fiction writer. His 2002 novel, Leaving Katya, was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection. Greenberg lectures widely on issues of ocean sustainability at diverse venues including the United States Supreme Court, Monterey Bay Aquarium and Culinary Institute of America. He has lectured and reported extensively overseas, with assignments in Russia, Ukraine, France, the Caucasus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, the West Bank/Gaza, and many other global locations. His book, Four Fish, has been translated into Spanish, Italian, German and Korean, and is soon to be published in Greek, Russian and Mandarin.

Dr. Demian Chapman takes a DNA sample from a nearly 15-foot blunt nose, six-gill shark in the Bahamas. Photo by Sean Williams, Cape Eleuthera Institute.

Dr. Demian Chapman is a shark geneticist helping small, island nations strengthen their ability to identify illegal shark fishing and enforce recently established shark sanctuaries. As a Fellow, Chapman will co-author influential articles, videos and blogs with Safina to establish better support for shark conservation worldwide.

Chapman’s research expertise lies in molecular biology and telemetry tracking, which he integrates to address research questions about how sharks and rays reproduce and disperse. He is investigating how shark reproduction and movements impact population dynamics, genetic diversity and geographic structure and the implications for conservation.

Dr. Chapman is the author of numerous peer-reviewed scientific research articles, and currently manages field research projects on sharks in Belize, the Bahamas, New Zealand and Florida. Chapman’s DNA lab is located near the Blue Ocean Institute office on Long Island, NY, in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University.

Debra Abercrombie tags, measures and takes samples from a female bull shark. Photo by Sean Williams, Cape Eleuthera Institute.

Debra Abercrombie is a marine biologist and shark expert, Debra is one of the discoverers of the fact that Chinese trade names for shark fins have high concordance with particular species. This means that visual fin identification is possible, even for threatened and endangered shark species. Abercrombie worked with the NOAA Office of Law Enforcement to genetically identify fins from prohibited shark species that were confiscated from commercial fishing operations in the Atlantic Ocean. She has published peer-reviewed papers on the genetic identification of CITES listed and proposed shark species (white shark, hammerheads) and the global fiind trade in leading journals such as Conservation Biology and Conservation Genetics.