Gavin Fay

About Me

G’day! I am currently employed as a postdoctoral research fellow in fisheries modelling at CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research in Hobart Australia, and am also in the process of completing my PhD in Aquatic & Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle. I am originally from England, and made the move from Seattle to Tasmania about 18 months ago. When I am not modelling fisheries I enjoy travelling, hiking, playing soccer, live music, camping, kayaking, movies, and good beer, preferably shared with good company over great food.

Research Interests

My general research interests centre on the application of quantitative approaches for providing scientific advice for the management of marine populations and ecosystems. A blue sky type question could be “How should we manage marine systems?”

My research focuses on developing and testing tools for stock assessment of marine fisheries and marine mammals, and using simulation modelling tools to evaluate the performance of management strategies designed to satisfy fisheries management objectives. More specifically, I am interested in methods for characterising and accounting for uncertainty within exploited marine ecosystems when taking action to satisfy fisheries management objectives, and evaluating how the performance of different management actions is impacted by this uncertainty.

My PhD research at UW examined the impacts of uncertainties associated with spatial structure when modelling and managing marine metapopulations.

My postdoctoral research project at CMAR is addressing the implications of accounting for non-stationary dynamics for stock assessment and management of marine fisheries within Australia. I am asking questions such as:

• “How do our management systems perform when the things assessment scientists routinely assume to be constant (e.g. growth, productivity, predation mortality) are actually changing?”, and
• “Can we identify candidate management strategies that are robust to such changes?”.

This involves a lot of simulation modelling, of course based around and guided by good old-fashioned data.

Besides my research projects, I also conduct stock assessments for several species (most recently for Patagonian toothfish at Macquarie Island), test harvest strategies and data collection schemes, and communicate the results to industry and managers.