Sean Windell, a student in the applied marine and watershed science master’s degree program, has been named one of 17 California Sea Grant Fellows for 2015.

The Sea Grant College program is a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and provides graduate students the opportunity to obtain experience in the planning and implementation of marine and coastal resource policies. Fellows are matched with a host agency and gain on-the-job experience during the 12-month paid fellowship.

Windell has already started working with the Interagency Ecological Program, a collaboration among nine agencies that does long-term monitoring in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. His project involves designing a conceptual life-cycle model for the winter run Chinook salmon, an endangered species.

Windell graduates from CSUMB this spring. For his thesis, he studied the value of habitat diversity in marine reserves, specifically the spiny lobster use of the intertidal zone at the Santa Catalina marine protected area. He worked in Dr. Corey Garza’s Marine Landscape Ecology Lab.

He earned an undergraduate degree at UC Santa Barbara, and then moved to Santa Cruz to work for the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans (PISCO). “I liked it so much that I wanted to go to grad school in the Monterey Bay area,” he said, and that led him to CSUMB.

He’s not sure what he’ll do after the fellowship ends. “Either job opportunities within this or other agencies, or hiking the Pacific Crest Trail,” he said.

Learn about the Applied Marine and Watershed program.