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ERF Members Honored

Nancy Rabalais Wins NRC Appointment and Ketchum Award

Nancy Rabalais, past president of ERF and professor at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, has been appointed the next chair of the Ocean Studies Board of the National Research Council. She is also the recipient of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute's Buck H. Ketchum Award for her contribution to coastal research.

"It's truly an honor to be respected and trusted by my peers," said Rabalias. "As usual my accomplishments reflect the close collaborations and friendships that have been a part of my research for a long time."
Rabalais has served as a member of the Ocean Studies Board for the past two years and has participated in several Ocean Studies Board committees. Her three-year appointment will begin January 2002. More information on the Ocean Studies Board is available at http://www4.nationalacademies.org/cger/osb.nsf/.

Early next year, Rabalais will be presented with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's Bostwick H. Ketchum Award for her contributions to coastal research. Her presentation is entitled "Mississippi River and Coastal Water Quality: Linking the Gulf of Mexico with the Continent.

The Ketchum Award was created to support an annual lecture by an internationally recognized ocean scientist who has shown innovative coastal/nearshore research; leadership in the scientific community; strong interdisciplinary interactions with colleagues; inspiration to students and younger scientists; the ability to effectively translate research results into the policy arena; and through, own work, address societal and environmental of coastal policy.

Other ERF members who have received this award are Bill Boicourt,
Christopher Martens, and Scott Nixon. For more information on the Ketchum Award, go to http://www.whoi.edu/coastalresearch/outreach/ketchum_main.html.

Charles Roman Receives National Park Service Award

After decades of research on the ecology of coastal ecosystems, Charles Roman, a research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) located at the University of Rhode Island's Graduate School of Oceanography, has been presented with the 2000 Director's Award for Natural Resource Research from the National Park Service.
Roman heads up the USGS Coastal Field Station at URI which conducts scientific research on coastal National Parks and National Wildlife Refuges with the objective of applying research findings to the protection of natural resources and development of effective natural resource management policies
His research, an essential component in protecting coastal barrier national seashores, includes restoring salt marshes and small estuaries, monitoring changes in coastal ecosystem structure, function and process, evaluating relationships between sea level rise and salt marsh habitat structure, and evaluating freshwater wetland ecosystems.