Research Intern, Aquatic Ecosystem Research Laboratory (AERL), UBC Vancouver
“Under the supervision of Professor Rashid Sumaila, the Director of the Fisheries Economics Research Unit at UBC Fisheries Centre, as well as a MPPGA faculty member, I am currently undertaking a research internship at the Aquatic Ecosystem Research Laboratory (AERL), where the diverse and inspiring range of academic and professional projects is definitely enriching my experience at UBC. I am delving into local but also international public policy issues in fisheries that are generally unknown to the civil society, while being consistently overlooked by the fishing industry and its greedy behavior when it comes to the constant pursuit of financial incentives.
Raphaël Roman at work in AERL
Specifically, I am collaborating on a 2014 Large Scale Applied Research Project Competition that brings together a national multidisciplinary team of academics coming from molecular biology, marine studies, social sciences and so forth, with the common aim of enhancing the production of Coho salmon in Canada by using new genome-based technologies (the project is notably referred as EPIC4). I am involved in the social sciences dimension of the project, with the aim to assess the economic and welfare impacts on the communities that are generally dependent on such a salmon species. Notably, this is an implicit move to place a value on ecosystem services. In order to do so, we are compiling data sets and generating reports from fieldwork, but also from the more recent literature vis-à-vis endangered fish species and new methods of aquaculture in Canada, before building an economic model that will mobilize recent knowledge in inter-generational discounting applied to cost-benefit analysis; aspiring to prove the positive economic repercussions on distinct stakeholders.
In the meantime, I am also delving into the intricacies of overfishing as well as Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing activities that are occurring across the South and East China seas, contributing to the enhancement of future prospects for fish populations across those complex water areas. Along with those two distinct projects, I am also sharpening my statistical skills with a graduate course on “Bayesian methods for fisheries stock assessment”, while being an official member of the Ocean Canada Partnership Project.”
~ Raphaël Roman, MPPGA Student
The Aquatic Ecosystem Research Laboratory (AERL) at UBC, Vancouver
