Visiting Scholars

2018

Dr. Eréndira Aceves Bueno

Dr. Eréndira Aceves Bueno comes to the Duke Marine lab as the 2018 McCurdy Scholar. She is broadly interested in developing management tools that can help solve and prevent over-exploitation problems in marine ecosystems. Focusing primarily on artisanal fisheries, her research seeks to understand the social and ecological consequences of different spatial management tools to inform policy-making. She applies novel methodologies by combining tactics from ecology and economics.For example, for her Ph.D. dissertation, she developed spatial bio-economic models to analyze the role of fish spillover and fishermen cooperation in the design of Territorial Use Rights in Fisheries (TURF’s). Her work is also heavily influenced and inspired by her past professional experience working with marine conservation non-profits in Baja California. She obtained a Ph.D. from the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, a masters’ degree in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation from Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a bachelors’ degree in Marine Biology from the Autonomous University of Baja California Sur, México. Read more about her work here.

Dr. Örjan Bodin

orjan_bodin_hiresDr. Bodin is an Associate Professor and joint stream leader for research on complex adaptive systems and resilience thinking at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University. His research focuses on social-ecological systems (SES). Using quantitative modelling and analyses of empirical data, Bodin describes the complex interactions between ecological and social components, especially in small-scale, and high sea fisheries. He has used this interdisciplinary approach to study concepts such as power asymmetry between small-scale fishermen with different economical relationships.

2017

Sergio Marrocoli

Sergio is PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) in Leipzig. His research focuses on wildlife governance in a sustainably certified logging concession in Northern Republic of Congo, and whether a hunter self-monitoring scheme can be useful for wildlife management. He used standard ecological surveys, lab-in-the-field economic experiments, and social network analysis in this work. During his visit, he worked with members of the Basurto Co-lab to assess how common-pool resource theory has been applied to wildlife hunting in the past, and how the theory and related frameworks might be applied to his own work.

2016

Dr. Maria del Mar Delgado-Serrano

IMG_3786Dr. Delgado-Serrano is an Associate Professor at the Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Policy at the University of Cordoba, Spain. Her background as an agriculture engineer is in the social and policy issues of rural areas in Europe and in Latin America. Previously, she coordinated a project on Community-based Management of Environmental challenges in Latin America that analysed sustainable governance models for natural resource management in 3 social-ecological systems. She is mainly interested in analysing the links between social and natural systems for sustainable development, the human aspects of environmental challenges, and community-based management of natural resources, with an emphasis on the factors that characterize resilience and governance of social-ecological systems. Currently, she is working with the Sustainable Land Management Network to analyse changes in land use and the governance models of common lands in several European countries.

Dr. Örjan Bodin

orjan_bodin_hiresDr. Bodin is an Associate Professor and joint theme leader for stewardship research at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University. His research focuses on social-ecological systems (SES). Using quantitative modeling and analyses of empirical data, Bodin describes the complex interactions between ecological and social components, especially in small-scale, and high sea fisheries. He has used this interdisciplinary approach to study concepts such as power asymmetry between small-scale fishermen with different economical relationships.

2015

Crisol Méndez

crisol_mendez

Crisol is a Mexican PhD student from El Colegio de la Frontera Sur, Chetumal. Trained as a sociologist, she completed her Masters in Natural Resources and Rural Development studying the public policies of fisheries. In her dissertation, she conducted a case study of the success of the Vigia Chico lobster cooperative, in the community of Punta Allen located within the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve. She explored the fisheries concession, which is a right-of-use bounded by a protected area. In her work, she incorporated perspectives from an institutional analysis approach and from political ecology in order to study the system of rights that allow for the sustainable use of resources. She used the concept of territoriality, understood as strategies for control over invested resources within a geographic area, thus implying a series of codes and regulations over the use of resources within this territory. Now, in her PhD dissertation, she is focusing her attention on the way local communities make use of available public policy to regulate fisheries and how protected areas and fisher concessions impact the fisheries’ success.

2014

René Loaiza

rene_loaiza-2_retouchRené is a Master of Science student studying Sustainability from the University of Sonora (UNISON) in Mexico.  He studied Marine Biology at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education Guaymas with a specialty in Sustainable Development from UNISON.  He has experience in aquaculture, small-scale commercial fishing, and seafood marketing. His research focuses on the environmental impact assessment of water jet fishing gear used in the geoduck clam (Panopea globosa) fishery in the upper Gulf of California and on designing sustainable management strategies for the fishery.

He reviewed literature and attended presentations and seminars about conservation biology, marine biodiversity, and social-ecological systems during his internship in the Social Science and Policy Lab at the Duke Marine Lab in summer & autumn of 2014. He also conducted informal interviews with researchers who have worked with impact assessments of marine environments and sustainable management.