The School of Marine and Environmental Affairs (SMEA) turned 50 this academic year, so we asked Nives Dolšak, professor and director of SMEA, and Dave Fluharty, professor and longest serving SMEA faculty member, for their perspectives on this milestone.  With 11 core faculty and strong support from professors of practice, adjunct, affiliate and emeritus faculty, SMEA offers a two-year, interdisciplinary, in-residence program with graduates receiving a Master of Marine Affairs degree. More than 80 graduate students are currently enrolled in the program.

The School of Marine and Environmental Affairs is now 50 years old! What does this milestone mean to you?

Dolšak: Our school was established in 1972 as the Institute for Marine Studies. Since then, our faculty and about 800 alumni have been shaping local, state, national and international norms, values, approaches, firms’ decisions, policies and laws. They are at the forefront of the provision of vital social and natural scientific information, forming collaborative networks of researchers and analysts, and co-producing knowledge with members of the communities they serve.

This anniversary provides us with a festive opportunity to reconnect, review our work and celebrate our accomplishments while identifying the best ways to address new and emerging challenges. I hope that our anniversary brings many of our alumni, partners and friends together in an energetic and collaborative environment, which will help us chart the course for the next decade or so.

Fluharty: I joined the Institute for Marine Studies as a post-doc in 1976. I felt extremely lucky to be able to come in on the ground floor of a new interdisciplinary program that allowed me to continue my career and research focus on marine regions management. Ed Miles’ North Pacific Project was the perfect place for me as I had “grown up” in the UW environment and wanted to continue working at the UW. To still be connected to this School and its alumi 47 years later is extremely rewarding to me personally.

Why was the school launched in 1972, and how has its mission/vision/approach evolved over the years?

Dolšak: The 1970s was probably the most influential decade in environmental protection in the U.S. and the world. In response to rapid growth of environmental protection policies, the University of Washington established the Institute for Marine Studies to provide teaching, research and public service on contemporary problems in ocean and coastal management. The director and faculty were appointed starting in 1974 and classes were offered shortly thereafter. The MMA degree was authorized in 1978, and the first degrees were awarded in 1980. In 1990, the school’s name changed to the School of Marine Affairs, and in 2011 the name was again changed to the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs to better reflect the broader environmental approach to addressing marine problems.

In these 50 years, our approach to educating future leaders in marine and environmental affairs has evolved in response to emerging challenges and new opportunities.

For example, in academic year 2022/23, our students conducted research and policy analysis in Puget Sound, Northern Mariana Islands, Alaska, Maine, California and Indonesia. They examined managed retreat as a climate change response strategy, community-based tourism, small-scale fishery resilience, renewable offshore energy, mitigation and adaptation to river flooding, conservation of migratory birds, preferences of underserved communities with respect to recreation, subsistence and recreation, relationships between climate solutions and human health, approaches to combating extreme labor abuses on the high seas and Salish Sea restoration efforts.

Fluharty: Our School has evolved in response to emerging opportunities at local, state, national and international levels. However, the hallmark remains a focus on interdisciplinary education that fosters a holistic perspective to problem solving and policy development. Recently the focus is increasingly on understanding and transforming policy and management to be more mindful of diversity, inclusion and environmental justice and taking into account the impacts of policy and management on underrepresented minorities, especially tribal entities in the Pacific Northwest.

What is unique about SMEA compared to other programs, and what are some of the biggest accomplishments of the School from your perspective?

Dolšak: There are a number of excellent schools in the U.S. and abroad that offer graduate education in marine and environmental affairs. We are in direct competition for the most dedicated and brightest students.

Yet we believe our school is unique in many ways. Our relatively small cohort provides students with an opportunity to work closely with our faculty and postdoctoral researchers. As they arrive at our school, each student is assigned a faculty advisor who mentors their academic pursuits and their career planning. Our graduate program provides broad, multidisciplinary training in marine sciences, environmental and natural resource economics, policy process, coastal law, marine policy analysis, and a variety of research methods with a focus on human dimensions of environmental change and environmental justice. The program provides students with the flexibility to focus their studies and obtain additional in-depth training from other schools within the College of the Environment and more broadly at UW. Our students pursue double Masters’ degrees and graduate certificates. They have an opportunity to work on applied marine and environmental projects with a number of partners outside academia. Joining SMEA also means students join an interconnected group with an extensive support network of outstanding professionals who graduated from our program.

Fluharty: By far and away, our School can be proud of its more than 800 graduates with a Masters of Marine Affairs degree. Our program is known for producing capable graduates that can contribute in just about any marine or environmental agency. I believe that our program has continuously had the largest number of Knauss Marine Policy Fellowships and Hershman Fellowships, a key starter for federal and state employment. Not only can one find our program graduates at the top of multiple federal and state agencies they are also working within non-governmental organizations, tribal governments and consulting firms. Moreover our international graduates are taking leading roles in fisheries management in Japan, Thailand and Korea as well as coastal management in Korea and China.

Dolšak: Since its establishment, faculty had immense impact in the areas of ecosystem management, ocean and climate governance, the Law of the Sea Convention, marine resource protection, ocean acidification, fisheries management and the use of novel research methods in marine and coastal research and analysis. Professor Ed Miles, for example, was the chief negotiator for the Micronesian Maritime Authority, Federated States of Micronesia, advised on the Law of the Sea, co-authored IPCC’s Second Assessment Report, studied effectiveness of international environmental regimes and founded the UW Climate Impacts Group, which then became the model for nine Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessment (RISA) programs at NOAA.

Our faculty founded and currently lead three externally funded research centers: Washington Ocean Acidification Center, Ocean Nexus Center and the eDNA Collaborative. In academic year 2021/22, our faculty published two books and 49 articles in peer-reviewed academic journals and secured external grants to defray the cost of their research in the amount of $7.8 million.

I am also immensely proud of our alumni, nearly 800 strong now. Let me illustrate with a few examples just from 2022 and 2023:

• Sapporo, Japan, March 22-24, 2023: three SMEA alumni meet at the 7^th Meeting of the North Pacific Fisheries commission. Shingo Ota (‘91), who retired from the Japanese Fisheries Agency but still serves as a Special Advisor to the Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries for International Affairs, and was appointed the Chairman of the NPFC at the last meeting. Dan Hull (‘92), Chairman of the NPFC’s Finance and Administration Committee; and Megan Willman, LCDR USCG (’22), on the U.S. delegation.
• Washington, D.C., May 11, 2022: U.S. Senate confirms Admiral Linda Fagan (‘00) to take over as the next Commandant of the Coast Guard, the first uniformed woman to lead a military branch.
• Silver Springs, Maryland, April 12, 2023: NOAA Fisheries announces Jennifer Quan (‘00) as the new Regional Administrator for NOAA Fisheries West Coast Region. She assumes her new post on April 23, 2023. For the last two years, she worked as an advisor to the Chair, Senator Maria Cantwell, on the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, where she was instrumental in passing 13 bills into law, including the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, Inflation Reduction Act, and reauthorization of the Coral Reef Conservation Act.
• Greenville, North Carolina, December 2022: Samantha Farquhar (’19), a doctoral student in the Integrated Coastal Sciences program at East Carolina University (ECU) receives the U.S. Department of State Fullbright-Hays award to study the impact of Indigenous-led commercial fisheries development in the Arctic. While at SMEA, she also received the Fulbright Fellowship to work with Blue Ventures on a social-ecological assessment of protected areas in in the Barren Isles.
• Olympia, WA and Seattle, WA, March 2022: Three SMEA alumni, Bobbak Talebi (’15), Tressa Arbow (’19), and Henry Bell (’20) from the Washington State Department of Ecology, and Jackson Blalock with Washington Sea Grant publish a report on Washington Coast Resilience, resulting from a two year collaborative work on the Washington Coast Resilience Action Demonstration Project, a partnership between the Washington State Department of Ecology and Washington Sea Grant that provided multi-organizational hazards assistance to communities on the Pacific Coast of Washington and laid the groundwork for future coastal resilience efforts.

In sum, our alumni tirelessly work across levels, sectors and issues at various organizations. From the Coast Guard, the U.S. Congress, NOAA, EPA, DOE, PNNL, Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, Washington Department of Ecology, Washington and Alaska commercial and Indigenous fisheries, voter and community engagement organizations, and  consulting organizations, they all work to ensure our society uses marine, coastal and environmental resources in a responsible and sustainable manner, and that the policies we devise empower the most vulnerable and historically marginalized communities.

What’s next? Where do you see the School in 10 years?

Dolšak: Coastal areas are the center of economic activity and population growth. These and other factors, such as climate change and emerging energy and other technologies, create significant stress for marine and coastal ecosystems and communities. Addressing human dimensions of environmental change, the core focus and expertise of SMEA faculty and researchers, is essential for our society’s ability to support sustainable development and healthy communities while protecting threatened marine and coastal ecosystems and species.

In the next 10 years, I see SMEA faculty, researchers and students support governmental and private-sector efforts by systematically studying human dimensions of environmental change in marine, coastal and adjacent systems, identifying emerging problems and opportunities, devising solutions, helping adopt and implement them, as well as rigorously assessing their impact. I see us co-producing this knowledge with partners from our communities while strengthening their capacity. To do all that, I hope we can further increase the size of the faculty and train more students.

Fluharty:  I would like to see SMEA continue to advance its traditional strengths and to lead the transformative changes necessary to anticipate and resolve emerging issues.

Please visit the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs’ website to learn more about the program.