Chris Cusack

Biography

Chris is a fisheries economist by training, specializing in bioeconomic modeling, rights based fisheries management, seafood markets and traceability and small scale fisheries management. Before training as an economist Chris spent over a thousand days working as a fisheries biologist in the Alaska and West Coast groundfish fisheries as well as three summers as a fisherman and cannery worker in the Alaska salmon fishery. Chris is a key member of EDF's Smart Boat Initiative (https://www.edf.org/oceans/smart-boats), which focuses on the identification, implementation and use of new and emerging technologies to help address contemporary fishery challenges. A key focus of this initiative is increasing the demand for all types of fisheries information while reducing the costs of collecting that information. We see electronic monitoring playing a fundamental role in this work.