Dr. Donald F. Boesch

Dr. Don Boesch is President of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental and Estuarine Studies (CEES), where he also holds the rank of Professor. CEES conducts comprehensive environmental research, trains graduate students, contributes to public education and advises public agencies and others on environmental and natural resource management from its three laboratories spread across the state: Chesapeake Biological Laboratory on Solomons Island, Appalachian Environmental Laboratory in Frostburg, and Horn Point Environmental Laboratory near Cambridge. Dr. Boesch is an internationally known marine ecologist who has conducted research in coastal and continental shelf environments along the Atlantic Coast, and in the Gulf of Mexico, eastern Australia and the East China Sea. He has published two books and more than 50 papers on marine benthos, estuaries, wetlands, the continental shelf, oil pollution, nutrient overenrichment, environmental assessment and monitoring, and science policy.

A native of New Orleans, Louisiana, Dr. Boesch was a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Queensland and was later on the William and Mary faculty. He returned to his home state of Louisiana in 1980 to build and direct that state's first permanent university marine laboratory and was Professor of Marine Science at Louisiana State University. He is active in extending knowledge to environmental and resource management at regional, national and international levels. He is a science advisor to the Chesapeake Bay Program and to Maryland state agencies and in such diverse regions as Alaska (advisor to the Federal and State trustees on the Exxon Valdez Oil spill), San Francisco Bay, coastal Louisiana, and south Florida. Over a twelve-year period he was a member of the Marine Board and the Ocean Studies Board of the National Research Council. He is currently assisting the President's National Science and Technology Council in the Mid-Atlantic Regional Pilot implementation of the National Environmental Monitoring Initiative.