UNC-CH Doctoral Graduate Begins Knauss Fellowship

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
E-Ching Lee, 919-515-9098, eching_lee@ncsu.edu

Ian Kroll is North Carolina’s latest Dean John A. Knauss Marine Policy fellow. He started his fellowship on Feb. 1.

Funded by the National Sea Grant College Program, the fellowship honors John A. Knauss, a Sea Grant founder and former dean of the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography.

Graduate students are placed for a year with agencies in Washington, D.C., to focus on federal policies and processes affecting ocean, coastal and Great Lakes issues.

Kroll, who holds a doctoral degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Institute of Marine Sciences, is a natural resource policy fellow at the Fish and Aquatic Conservation Branch within the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

He will study why unintentional barriers to fish passage are created, as well as the challenges, opportunities and current actions to prevent them. The goal is to develop a nationwide report to communicate the need to better manage fish barriers and that provides policy recommendations on how to achieve this.

Kroll will gather stakeholders, partners from nongovernmental organizations and government officials to review the report and identify actions for the recommendations to be implemented successfully.

“I am looking forward to learning about federal programs that target fisheries and habitat conservation within the U.S., and how these programs are not only created but also used to implement and enforce policy,” Kroll says. “I hope to discover where potential barriers to fish passage may arise and how to mitigate them.”

For his doctoral work at IMS, Kroll assessed the links among the larval, juvenile and adult subpopulations of commercially important fisheries across estuaries. His research included studies on larval oyster dispersal in Pamlico Sound and estuarine habitat use by juvenile black sea bass.

A native of Los Angeles, California, Kroll received the National Sea Grant College Program/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries fellowship in 2014. He received a bachelor’s degree in biology from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York.

He is the 72nd Knauss fellow from North Carolina. Explore North Carolina’s branch of the alumni network and learn more about their unique experiences by visiting go.ncsu.edu/where-are-they-now.

The deadline for applications for the 2018 Dean John A. Knauss Marine Policy Fellowship is Feb. 21, 2017. Learn more about the application process.

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