National Science Foundation Funds Science Center for Marine Fisheries

The University of Southern Mississippi's Gulf Coast Research Laboratory has received funding from the National Science Foundation for the new Science Center for Marine Fisheries.

The center is a National Science Foundation Industry/ University Cooperative Research Center that will be housed at the University of Southern Mississippi and the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences. The center will provide an academic resource for the fishing industry throughout the Mid-Atlantic and Gulf coast region.

I/UCRC centers are designed to provide the business community with the opportunity to gain access to science to help fulfill their needs. For more than 40 years, the National Science Foundation has sponsored the highly competitive I/UCRC program which has become a model for collaborative research between industry and universities throughout the country.

Successful management of U.S. fisheries is limited by insufficient information on finfish and shellfish stocks and fisheries and insufficient development of analytical and modeling applications to surmount the challenges posed by sustainability goals. The mission of the Science Center for Marine Fisheries is to utilize academic, recreational, and commercial fisheries resources to address urgent scientific problems limiting sustainable fisheries.

The center seeks to simultaneously achieve the goals of sustainable fish and shellfish stocks and sustainable fish and shellfish fisheries. The center is unique in being the only federal-industry partnership in fisheries science today that permits the fishing industry to retain a leadership role in designing the science program. This will assure that the goal of sustainable fisheries will remain a focus of project design and that the science products produced will address the issues faced by the fishing industry directly.

The Industry Advisory Board for the center, which is made up of business and federal partners that have agreed to support the Center, is expected to meet for the first time on June 21.

For more information about the Science Center for Marine Fisheries visit::http://www.SCeMFiS.org