Room: 325 Westbury Mount    Phone: 01248 382898

E-mail: a.heenan@bangor.ac.uk

Web: Google Scholar  ResearchGate

In 2003, I obtained a B.Sc. in Zoology at the University of Edinburgh and an M.Sc. in Tropical Coastal Management at Newcastle University upon Tyne in 2004.  After my MSc I worked for the IUCN (World Conservation Union) Shark Specialist Group, contributing to Red Listing and CITES processes for species of Sharks, Skates and Rays. From 2006-2010 I did a PhD on the settlement behavior of larval coral reef fish, working at the Lizard Island research station on an Australian Museum Doctoral Fellowship, as well as in Indonesia and the Philippines. After my PhD, I worked as a marine ecologist, communicating scientific information to the Irish Sea Conservation Zone (ISCZ) stakeholder group, one of the regional projects in the UK national ecological network of marine conservation areas. From 2011-2017 I was based at the NOAA Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center in Honolulu, Hawaii where I worked as an applied scientist for a long-term monitoring program. In that role, my time was split between collecting and analyzing a large-scale coral reef ecosystem monitoring dataset and capacity building for the implementation of an Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Management (EAFM). In 2017 I took a Ser Cymru fellowship at the School of Ocean Sciences. This is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 663830.

I am now a full time lecturer at the School of Ocean Sciences, where my research focuses on modelling coral reef fishes to try and understand how coral reef ecosystems function and how humans interact with them. In my previous role at NOAA I had the extraordinary opportunity to dive on some of the most remote and pristine coral reefs on the planet. Doing so gave me an appreciation for the need to understand natural variation in ecosystem state due to the physical environment, in order to better understand and manage human activities. I have a strong interest in the information and data needs that can enable sustainable fisheries, and how we can put an Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Management into practice. This includes implementing collaborative and integrated monitoring, with reproducible and standardized methods and data management protocols, as well as validating novel indicators for a whole system perspective.

Research Areas

• Marine Conservation and Resource Management
• Marine Ecology