Who We Are

Brendan Connors - I am a Research Scientist based out of the Institute of Ocean Sciences in Victoria. I am an applied population ecologist by training, and fisheries scientist by experience. I originally joined DFO in 2018 as the Program Head for Sablefish (aka Black Cod), a long lived demersal species that supports a commercially important fishery off of Canada’s west coast. In 2021 I switched gears to start up a salmon focused research program with an emphasis on quantitative methods, salmon-ecosystem interactions, and fisheries risk assessment and management. Prior to joining DFO I did a postdoc in the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University on salmon macroecology and assessment of indicators of conservation status, and then spent five years at ESSA Technologies. I completed my PhD at Simon Fraser University in the Department of Biological Sciences on parasite ecology and population level consequences of farmed and wild salmon interaction and spent most of my springs working out of the Salmon Coast Field Station in the Broughton Archipelago. A list of my publications is available in Google Scholar.
Brooke Davis -
Cameron Freshwater - I am a Research Scientist at the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo. I began researching salmon marine ecology as a PhD student at the University of Victoria and joined DFO as a postdoc in 2017 with Carrie Holt where I helped develop closed-loop simulation tools to support fisheries management. Since 2020 I have led the Applied Salmon Ecology Program which specializes in leveraging data from at-sea surveys and telemetry studies to parameterize life cycle models for ecosystem-based management. Our current projects are focused on marine spatial distributions, predator-prey interactions, and fishery impacts. A list of my publications are available on Google Scholar.
Carrie Holt - I am a Research Scientist at the Pacific Biological Station with Fisheries and Oceans Canada in Nanaimo, BC, leading a program on assessment methods and decision support tools for Pacific salmon. This program aims to facilitate communication and decision-making at the interface between science and management. Research focuses on the development of reference points for Pacific salmon, decision-support tools that integrate harvest, hatchery and habitat impacts for salmon, and assessment approaches that interface western science and Indigenous Knowledge Systems. I started my research career as a young adventurer exploring and enjoying the lakes of Southern Ontario. I studied zooplankton in acid-damaged lakes in eastern Canada for my MSc, followed by a PhD in salmon assessment and management at Simon Fraser University, and post-doctoral research at the University of Washington incorporating climate variables into groundfish assessments. While trained in western science I aim to practice this discipline with openness to a plurality of knowledge systems. My publications are available on Google Scholar.
Catarina Wor -
Paul Van-Dam Bates - I am a Research Scientist at the Pacific Biological station, working on estimating species composition of salmon on the Fraser River based on hydroacoustic data. I am an ecological statistician and am new to fisheries modelling. I am very interested in computational problems and contribute to the R package NIMBLE, developing numerical methods to approximate posterior distributions as well as efficient MCMC algorithms. I did my PhD at St Andrews in Scotland (2023), developing models to estimate animal density from camera traps and acoustics animal identities are not known. Before that, I worked as a government statistician at the Department of Conservation in New Zealand, developing national biodiversity monitoring programs. I completed my bachelors (2011) and masters degree (2014) at the University of Victoria, with a focus on capture-recapture methods.
Jan Finke -
Dylan Glaser -
Dan Greenberg - I am a Research Biologist at the Pacific Biological Station, working on empirical and simulation studies on Pacific salmon population dynamics. Much like the salmon, it was a bit of a long migration to get here – having started my research career over a decade ago studying first the population dynamics of amphibians (M.Sc. – McGill University, 2013) and subsequently their extinction risk from an evolutionary lens (Ph.D. – Simon Fraser University, 2019). Thankfully, amphibians are (in a reductivist sense) just fish that had the audacity to make a living on land – so it was a fairly smooth metamorphosis into reorienting my thinking towards fish population dynamics, where I’ve been working for the past 5 years with postdoctoral positions at Scripps Institute of Oceanography (2020-2021) studying the application of opportunistic citizen science data for fish population monitoring, and then here at Fisheries and Oceans Canada studying salmon spawner-recruit dynamics (2022 – ). My past research, spanning biomechanics, ecophysiology, population ecology, evolution, and more, can be found here.
Ann-Marie Huang -
Hannah Hunter - I am a biologist in the Salmon Risk Assessment and Management program. During my Master’s in Resource & Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University, I studied BC’s recreational Rainbow Trout fishery using a simulation model to evaluate alternative hatchery stocking strategies. Since joining DFO in 2023, I have focused on quantifying the potential effects of climate change and at-sea competition on Sockeye, Pink, and Chum salmon across the Northeast Pacific. I am based in Vancouver at DFO Regional Headquarters.
Justin Flemming -
Anna Potapova -