Board of Directors
WSU is governed by an elected Board of Directors and Regional Representatives who represent six geographic regions: Africa/Indian Ocean, Asia, Australasia, Europe, North America, and South America.
officers
Lindsay Young
Board Chair
Member Organization: Pacific Rim Conservation
Dr. Lindsay Young is the Executive Director and co-founder of Pacific Rim Conservation, a non-profit organization dedicated to conserving and preventing the extinction of imperiled birds throughout the Pacific. Read More.
Grant Humphries
Vice Chair
Member Organization: Black Bawks Data Science Ltd.
Academically, Grant’s career started at Memorial University where his love for the ocean and birds combined after a field season in the Aleutian Islands, Alaska. He continued on to do a Masters in Alaska and a PhD in New Zealand, working on Procellariiform seabirds with a focus on utilizing machine learning for quantifying complex ecological relationships. His work took him onwards to California and then to New York, where he began working with Antarctic penguins. Read More.
Juliet Lamb
Secretary
Member Organization: Pacific Seabird Group, Waterbird Society
Juliet currently works as a Marine Scientist with The Nature Conservancy. She holds a Bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, a Master’s degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she studied habitat management for breeding terns in the Gulf of Maine, and a Ph.D. from Clemson University. Read More.
Melanie Steinkamp
Treasurer
Melanie is the Species Management Program Coordinator for the Ecosystems Mission Area.
Board of directors
Tegan Carpenter-Kling
Region: Africa/Indian Ocean
Member Organizations: BirdLife South Africa
In her MSc and PhD research, Tegan worked with dietary and tracking data to understand the response of albatrosses, penguins, and petrels to their ever-changing foraging landscape. Read More.
Akinori Takahashi
Region: Asia
Member Organization: National Institute of Polar Research, Japan
Akinori obtained both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s of Science from Hokkaido University. In 2001, he attained his Ph.D. at The Graduate University for Advanced Studies (SOKENDAI) with his thesis on the foraging and breeding ecology of Adélie penguins. Read More.
Chris Gaskin
Region: Australasia
Organization: Northern NZ Seabird Trust
Chris’s seabird research has involved a lot of time at sea amassing seabird observations, and together with visits to island locations, provided much-needed information about seabird populations in northern New Zealand. Read More.
Ken Morgan
Region: North America
Upon completing his Master’s at Dalhousie University (Nova Scotia, Canada) in 1984, Ken moved to British Columbia. His career as a seabird biologist began in 1986 when he was contracted (by the Canadian Wildlife Service (CWS) to survey seabirds off Canada’s west coast. Following several years of short-term positions, Ken was offered a ‘permanent’ job with CWS. Read More.
Carlos Zavalaga
Region: South America
Organization: Universidad Científica del Sur
Carlos B. Zavalaga began his career as a researcher on seabirds at Punta San Juan in 1992. At that time, he began studying the Humboldt penguins and Inca terns. After obtaining his Bachelor’s (1992) and Professional Title (1997) in Biology at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, he worked as a researcher at the Marine Institute of Peru in the Marine Mammal research unit. Read More.
Alex Robbins
Region: Europe
Organization: NaturScot
Dr. Alex Robbins is a marine ornithologist with NatureScot, advising industry and government on the impacts of marine renewable energy developments on Scottish seabird populations. Alex started working in conservation policy and advice in 2005. Since 2006, Alex has undertaken seabird fieldwork in Prince William Sound, Alaska, and Shetland, UK, for her Master’s and then PhD, as well as working as a warden at Noss National Nature Reserve. Read More.
past chairs
David Irons
Organizations: Arctic Insight, US Fish and Wildlife Service
I came to Alaska in 1976 from Penn State to work on a sea otter project on Attu Island, where I spent many cold hours underwater in leaky dry suits counting sea urchins and other benthic invertebrates. My attention began switching from marine mammals and the nearshore community to seabirds and the marine ecosystem. I have worked throughout Alaska on seabird foraging behavior and ecology and population changes related to food availability and climate change. Recently I have been working with seabird scientists from the circumpolar Arctic to investigate the effects of climate change at the circumpolar scale. I have also chaired the World Seabird Union from its inception until 2015.