People

Faculty and CORU leader

William Cheung develops and uses scenarios and models to understand the responses of marine ecosystems and fisheries to global change and explore options for solving sustainability challenges for seafood and marine biodiversity under climate change. His works cut across multiple disciplines, from natural to social sciences, and range from local to global scales. He is actively involved in international initiatives that bridge science and policy including being coordinating lead author/lead author in the assessment reports of the IPCC and IPBES.

Senior Research Associates

Areas of practice – with a particular focus on developing economies – include small-scale fisheries; global change; food and nutrition security; ecosystem approaches to policy; illegal fisheries and forced labor; sustainable development; marine genetic resources; ocean finance; ecosystem modelling; and ocean equity.

Also holds a Research Associate position at Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions

Vicky’s research interests lie in understanding the socio-economic impacts of global change on marine resources, fisheries and human well-beings. She is experienced in studying the socio-ecological vulnerability of coastal countries, communities and fishers to climate change, as well as exploring adaptation options. She is also interested in understanding the spatial dynamic of fishing effort and how the change in fishers’ behaviour would affect the harvest under climate change by using a modeling approach.

Areas of practice: – biogeography and macroecology including identification, characterization and modelling of ocean systems from local to global scales; – linkages between physical, biogeochemical ocean conditions and marine biodiversity from plankton to top predator using explorative statistic for big data; – quantification of anthropogenic perturbations and – implementation of conservation guideline

Research Associates

Postdoctoral Fellows

Tayler Clarke´s main research interests are data deficient fisheries in the tropical Eastern Pacific and how they may be affected by climate change. During her PhD, she focused on the impacts of warming and deoxygenation on marine ectotherms in the region. She is now a postdoctoral researcher, where she is studying the effects of warming and deoxygenation on global coral reef fisheries. Tayler is also further developing the Aerobic Habitat Index and exploring its potential applications to improve our understanding of how warming and deoxygenation may affect marine resources and ecosystems.

Ravi is interested in the behavior of ecosystems, and how stressors at different levels affect their functions. In his recently completed PhD research, he explored how climate-driven changes in coral community structure may affect their ability to provide habitats for reef fishes. He is currently engaged in research exploring the climate vulnerability of fisheries in tropical developing nations.

Muhammed’s research aims to understand aquatic food systems potential contribution to future global seafood production, particularly under climate change. He engaged predictive models and scenarios for his research investigations.

Research Assistant

Graduate Students

Juliano looks to understand the impacts of climate change on transboundary fish stocks and fisheries (e.g., those that straddle between neighbouring territories) as well as their management, thereby informing international fisheries governance to prepare and respond to climate-driven shifts in species distributions.

Ambre is interested in the evolutionary dynamics of fish stocks under fishing and climate change, and how they might impact future marine ecosystems and food security for coastal BC communities.

Alumni

Andrés Cisneros-Montemayor (PhD) is a resource economist specializing in marine systems and cross-scale development policy. He is Deputy Director of the Nippon Foundation Ocean Nexus Program and Research Associate at the University of British Columbia.

Expertise: Integrating ecological and societal information sources to understand human impacts on the oceans.