National Shellfisheries Association

Roger Mann is a Professor of Marine Science at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) and Site Director for the Science Center for Marine Fisheries (http://www.scemfis.org/). He served as Director for Research and Advisory Services at VIMS from 2003-2012 and as a Virginia delegate to the Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Management Council from 2016-2019. He has served on review panels for NOAA, EPA and NSF, and provided Congressional Testimony on control of non-native species introductions and climate impacts on Virginia Natural resources. He has received professional awards including Chesapeake Bay Commission Tribute to Excellence, the William and Mary School of Marine Science Outstanding Teacher Award, and the Plumeri Award for Faculty Excellence at William and Mary. He is a Honored Life Member of the National Shellfisheries Association.

Joao G. Ferreira is a Professor in Environmental Engineering at the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the New University of Lisbon, Portugal. He was educated in the U.K. and Portugal in the areas of oceanography and environmental sciences. He has coordinated the modelling component of fifteen European and six other international research projects over the last twenty years, in areas such as aquaculture, eutrophication, and coastal zone management. He has published sixty-five papers in peer-reviewed journals, several book chapters, and coordinated the publication of the COEXIST/FORWARD (goodclam.org), SPEAR (biaoqiang.org), and SMILE (ecowin.org/smile) books. He is the author of the EcoWin system-scale ecological modeling software, and co-author of the FARM carrying capacity model, used for local-scale aquaculture modeling. Both models have been widely used in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America. He is a co-author of the ABC screening model for simulating disease risk in aquaculture, and co-authored the ASSETS eutrophication assessment model in collaboration with NOAA. He was a member of the EU Water Framework Directive Common Implementation Strategy task group for estuarine and coastal systems, and led the eutrophication descriptor guidance group for the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive.

J. Evan Ward is the Head of the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Connecticut. He was awarded a Ph.D. in Marine Biology and Biochemistry from the University of Delaware in 1989 and received the E. Sam Fitz Award for greatest aptitude for professional development in marine studies from the University. As a professor of marine sciences at UConn, Ward has been the recipient of a National Science Foundation Career Award and two Fulbright Foreign Scholarships. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of Panama (2004) and University of Exeter in the UK (2011). Ward also served as the lead PI and Director of a NOAA Oceans and Human Health training consortium, focusing on interdisciplinary research and training in coastal-ecosystems & human Health. In 2013, he was elected to the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering. For the past 30 years, Ward has studied environmental physiology of marine, suspension-feeding invertebrates. Recently, his research has focused on capture, ingestion and elimination of microplastics and nanomaterial by commercially important species, and the impacts of these particles on feeding and digestive processes. His research is funded by grants from the USDA (National Institute of Food and Agriculture), NOAA-Marine Debris Program, and National Science Foundation (Integrative Organismal Systems). Ward has published over 80 scientific papers and book chapters and has served on the Editorial Board of several scientific journals.

Luz Pérez-Parallé is Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). She is a member of the Group of Molecular Biology and Development in Aquaculture. She received a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the same University in 1990. During her career she won a NATO scholarship for a postdoc position at the Marie Curie Research Institute (Surrey, UK) and she also enjoyed postdoc positions at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Medical Research Council (Cambridge, UK) and at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada), where she studied the regulation of gene expression during development, protein and chromatin interactions. She joined the Institute of Aquaculture in 1997 where she has served as secretary since 2015. Her research interests lie in the improvement of the production of different species of marine bivalve molluscs (different aspects such as conditioning of broodstock and induction of settlement and metamorphosis, characterization of developmental genes and receptors) and the mitigation of the effects of toxic tides: mechanisms for the elimination of biotoxins in bivalve molluscs and `omic´ technologies applied to aquaculture.