Eric Schneider

B.S. University of Massachusetts, Amherst

M.S. University of Rhode Island

Eric graduated from University of Massachusetts, Amherst with a B.S. in Natural Resource Sciences in 2000. He then worked as a research technician in a variety of systems for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, UMass Cooperative Research Unit, and National Park Service, as well for Wake Forest University in the Galapagos Archipelago, before pursuing a Master’s Degree at the University of Rhode Island (URI). After completing his M.S. at URI in 2005, Eric began his career at the Rhode Island (RI) Dept. of Environmental Management (DEM) in the Office of Water Resources as biologist in the before moving to the Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF) in 2008. At DMF, Eric has broad habitat-related responsibilities focusing on habitat assessment, protection, and restoration. Since 2014, he has led the DMF oyster restoration program and worked collaboratively with Drs. Jonathan Grabowski and Randall Hughes, and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) on oyster-related research in RI. Eric is co-advised by Drs. Grabowski and Hughes and is broadly interested in fisheries, conservation, and community ecology. In the Grabowski lab, Eric is particularly interested using standardized survey and analytical approaches to quantify fish and mobile invertebrate production of restored oyster reefs, as well as assessing how restoration practices, oyster reef community properties, and environmental factors influence restoration success. He’s also particularly interested using approaches that consider both social and ecological aspects to develop restoration plans for shellfish in RI.

Email: eric.schneider@dem.ri.gov

Alicia Miller

B.S. The George Washington University

M.S. University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

Alicia graduated with a B.S. in Biology from The George Washington University in 2003. After completing her undergraduate studies, she worked as a taxonomy technician for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Systematics Laboratory at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC. Two years later she relocated to NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) in Woods Hole, MA, and would continue her career over the next 15+ years working on a variety of fisheries issues including collecting and processing fisheries and oceanographic data, developing ecosystem-based surveys, utilizing tagging data to better understand the marine migration of Atlantic salmon, working to include environmental variables in modeling population dynamics, developing data visualization techniques, and modeling entanglement risk of fixed gear fisheries on large whales. While working at the NEFSC she also completed a M.S. in 2010 from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s School of Marine Science and Technology where her research investigated the effects of epizootic shell disease on early life history of the American lobster. Alicia joined the Grabowski Lab in 2021 and hopes to focus her dissertation research around her current work with North Atlantic right whales.

Email: alicia.miller@noaa.gov