Press Conference Participants
Dr. William E. Evans is Visiting Professor at the University of Notre Dame and Professor Emeritus of Marine Biology at Texas A&M University. He is an internationally recognized expert on marine environmental policy, fisheries, and resource management. During his twenty-two years of Federal Service both with the Navy and later with the Department of Commerce he was involved in making environmental policy, participating in writing legislation, writing environmental impact statements, environmental impact assessments and endangered species take permits. As Chairman of the Marine Mammal Commission from 1984 until 1986 and later Under Secretary of Commerce and Administrator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration he negotiated several international environmental and fisheries agreements. He also served as a delegate and later the U.S. Commissioner for the International Whaling Commission (IWC) 1982-1990. His own research and mentoring of graduate students has spanned from population biology to marine bioacoustics.
Dr. Paul Boyle is Senior Vice President for Conservation and Education at the Association of Zoos & Aquariums (AZA). Formerly he was the Director of the New York Aquarium. He has over twenty-five years experience creating and directing aquatic conservation, environmental science, public education, and museum exhibit programs. He earned a BA in Marine Science at Northeastern University, a Masters in Environmental Engineering at Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in Applied Environmental Sciences, also at Harvard, and graduated from the Wharton School’s Executive Management program. Trained as an environmentalist and marine research scientist, he managed many different facets of nonprofit institutions before leading the nation’s oldest public aquarium in New York. He has earned many grants and awards for scientific and environmental research and making ocean science accessible to public audiences. He has served on the Board of the Association of Zoos & Aquariums (AZA) and continues to serve as an advisor to many conservation and animal welfare efforts. In 1996 Dr. Boyle founded The Ocean Project, an international effort with over 1,000 partner institutions working to increase awareness of the crucial roles the ocean plays in human survival. Today, The Ocean Project is one of the world’s leading organizations working to improve the effectiveness of ocean-related, public communications rooted in science, and engaging people in becoming personally involved in protecting our ocean for the future.
Dr. Louis M. Herman is Professor of Psychology at the University of Hawaii. He is the founder of the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory and the nonprofit The Dolphin Institute. He is known internationally as a leading world expert on dolphin cognitive abilities. He is editor or co-editor of two books on dolphins and whales and has published over 100 scientific articles on dolphins and other cetaceans. His work has been featured in over 180 media presentations, including film, television documentaries, and magazine and newspaper articles. He is the recipient of numerous grants and research contracts and has been honored with the Frank A. Beach Comparative Psychology Award from the American Psychological Association, the Significant Professional Contribution Award from the Hawaii Psychological Association, and the Creative Talent Award from the American Institutes for Research.
Dr. Lori Marino is Senior Lecturer in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology at Emory University in Atlanta and also holds positions as Affiliate Faculty in the Living Links Center for the Advanced Study of Ape and Human Evolution at Emory and Research Associate at the National Museum of Natural History in Wash. D.C. She is the recipient of numerous government and private research grants and serves on the editorial board of several prominent scientific journals. Her research on cetacean brain size has revealed that, when body size is taken into account, many dolphin species possess brains significantly larger than other mammals and intriguingly close in size to modern human brains. In 2001 she and Diana Reiss co-authored the first conclusive evidence for mirror self-recognition in a non-primate species - the bottlenose dolphin – in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Steve Olson is AZA's Vice President of Government Affairs. The Government Affairs Department represents the interests of AZA before Congress and Federal agencies. The Department monitors Federal legislation and regulations, analyzes the impact of bills and regulations on AZA members and develops position recommendations with the Government Affairs Committee and the AZA Board of Directors, supplies information on legislation and regulations to its member institutions, and works with government officials on developing effective Federal legislation, regulations and partnerships. Olson received his B.S. and M.S. in Wildlife Management from Colorado State University. In 1987, he began work for the U.S. House of Representatives' Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee. He has also worked for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as the project manager for the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary and the National Coastal Resources Institute as its executive director.
Dr. Diana Reiss is Professor of Psychology at Hunter College in New York City and, formerly was Senior Research Scientist and the founder/ director of the Marine Mammal Research Program at the Osborn Laboratories of Marine Science at the Wildlife Conservation Society’s New York Aquarium. She is adjunct faculty in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology at Columbia University. She also serves as a member of the Animal Welfare Committee of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. Her research focuses on dolphin cognition and communication, comparative cognition and the evolution of intelligence. She has conducted pioneering work in vocal learning in dolphins and recently published a ground-breaking study with her colleague Dr. Lori Marino demonstrating that dolphins, like humans and great apes, have the capacity for mirror self-recognition, a hallmark of self-awareness. She has authored papers published in numerous international scientific journals and book chapters and her work has been featured in many television science programs.
Dr. Sam H. Ridgway is Professor of Pathology in the School of Medicine at University of San Diego. Dr. Ridgway is a world renowned marine mammal veterinarian and Ph.D. who has served on the Scientific Advisory Committee to the Marine Mammal Commission, on four different committees of the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences, and was elected a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America for his studies on marine mammal hearing and as a fellow of the American College of Zoological Medicine for his work on marine mammal medicine. Dr. Ridgway pioneered research on dolphin anesthesia, medical technology, and methods for studying trained dolphins swimming freely in the open sea and his work has been published in more than 250 leading publications. In 1987 Dr. Ridgway completed a general book for young readers, Dolphin Doctor, which is now in its 4th printing.
Karen Sausman graduated from Loyola University of Chicago with a Bachelor of Science and did her graduate work at the University of Redlands, in Redlands, California. She has worked in zoological parks and in conservation since 1964. In 1970 she helped found The Living Desert and has been its President/CEO since its inception. The Living Desert, dedicated to the conservation and interpretation of the world’s deserts, controls 1,800 acres; has over $30 million in capital improvements; a staff of 150; and over 350,000 visitors a year. She has been a member of the Board of Directors of the American Zoo and Aquarium Association (AZA) for two different terms and has chaired the AZA’s Ethics Committee. She has been the international studbook keeper for several endangered species. She is a Steering Committee member of the IUCN/ SSC/ Conservation Breeding Specialist Group. She is also a founding board member for the International Species Information System (ISIS). She is currently the President for the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums (WAZA), a network comprising about 12,000 zoological institutions around the world.
Dr. Hal Whitehead is Professor of Biology at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. For the last 30 years he has been conducting pioneering field work on the behavior, ecology, population structure, and conservation status of dolphins and whales. His work has revolutionized our view of the roles of society and culture in dolphins and whales. He has been supported by numerous scientific grants and is the recipient of a COSEWIC (Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada) Service Award. The author of over 120 papers published in scientific journals and fifteen essays in collected volumes, he is the co-editor of Cetacean Societies: Field Studies of Whales and Dolphins (2000), the author of Voyage to the Whales (1989) and, most recently, Sperm Whales: Social Evolution in the Ocean (2003).