Dr. Peter Westley
Alaska Salmon in a Warming World: From too hot to just warm enough
About the Speaker
Dr. Peter Westley: A life-long Alaskan from Western European ancestry with an B.S., M.S in Fishery and Aquatic Sciences from the University of Washington, and Ph.D. in Biology from Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. Currently teaching a 100-level introductory fisheries course, an upper division and graduate level fish ecology course, and a 300-level asynchronous online course about the relationships between salmon and people in Alaska and beyond. He has served on the Marine Fishes Specialist Subcommittee of COSEWIC (Canada), a reviewer for the Washington State Academy of Sciences, the Hatchery Scientific Review Group, and the Science Panel of the Alaska Hatchery Research Program (a joint project between management agencies, academia, and aquaculture industry). Currently, Peter is associate professor, Wakefield Chair of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, and PI of the Salmonid Evolutionary Ecology and Conservation Lab at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (seec-lab.com) where he and his students use ‘natural experiments’ represented by climate change, biological invasion and colonization, and hatchery and wild fish interactions to explore fundamental questions with applied importance for sustaining the connections between salmon, people, and place. He is also co-PI of NSF/NRT Tamamta, a graduate training program dedicated to the elevation of Indigenous Knowledge to its proper place alongside western science with the goal of transforming fisheries and ocean sciences together. He lives with his wife Donna and son Finn on the traditional homelands of the lower Tanana dene’ people who have walked these grounds and been in relation with salmon for 11,000+ years.