Graduate Program at the Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia

Between March 2006 and March 2007, five travel scholarship in the amount of CAD$625 each were awarded to Fisheries Centre graduate students intending to present a paper or a poster at a conference.

The awards were due to a generous donation from the Pacific Fishery Biologists (PFB), an organization of professional biologists chartered in 1936 to "promote fisheries science through research, cooperation and the free exchange of ideas." Meeting annually from 1936 until 2000, the PFB had over 600 members from Alaska, Washington, Oregon and California, and from British Columbia and the Yukon Territories. The PFB offered scholarships to allow fisheries students to attend their meetings. When the organization disbanded in 2004, the assets in its scholarship fund were shared equally among four universities, the UBC Fisheries Centre's share being US$3750. The funds have now been depleted and no further PFB Scholarships will be awarded.

The UBC Fisheries Centre held two competitions per year, with applications due March 1 and September 1. Students applied for the award by sending an e-mail to office@fisheries.ubc.ca, attaching an abstract of their conference contribution. A committee of Fisheries Centre faculty members selected the winners.

Scholarship recipients were required to write a report on the conference for FishBytes.

The scholarship for the March 2007 competition were awarded to the following students:

Erin Rechisky (PhD Zool), to attend the American Fisheries Society Annual Meeting in San Francisco, CA, to present her research in two symposia on acoustic telemetry as a tool for measuring salmon survival;

Jonathan Anticamara (PhD RMES), to attend the Student Conference on Conservation Science (SCCS) March 27-29, 2007, in Cambridge, UK, to present a paper on "Understanding the ecology and implications of recovering degraded reef communities within no-take Marine Protected Areas";

Gaku Ishimura (PhD RMES), to attend the annual meeting of the North American Association of Fisheries Economists in Merida, Mexico, March 27-30, 2007, to present his research on "Game theoretic analysis for the time-variant/asymmetric share of the fish stock driven by Climate Change - a case of the Pacific Sardine Fisheries".

The scholarship for the September 2006 competition was awarded to Ms Megan Bailey, to attend the March 2007 Forum of the North American Association of Fisheries Economists in Merida, Mexico, to present a paper on "Applications of Principal-Agent Analysis to Ecosystem-Based Management in Raja Ampat, Indonesia".

The scholarship for the April 3, 2006 competition was awarded to Ms Yajie Liu, to attend the International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade (IIFET) 2006, July 11-14, 2006 in Portsmouth, UK. The theme of the conference was "Rebuilding Fisheries in an Uncertain Environment". Yajie made an oral presentation titled "Estimating Costs of Sea Lice from Salmon Aquaculture on Wild Salmon Fisheries", and a poster presentation titled "Economic Values for Pinto Abalone Haliotis kamtschatkana Selective Breeding Index".

Pacific Fishery Biologists Scholarship