Dr. Geoff Shester is currently the California Program Director for the international conservation organization Oceana, based in their Monterey Office. After completing his undergraduate degree at the University of California, Santa Cruz, he worked for the Exxon Valdez Restoration Office in Anchorage, Alaska and served as a Conservation Coordinator for Oceana’s Juneau office, where he helped protect deep sea coral habitats from bottom trawling from California to the Bering Sea. He earned his doctorate in the Stanford University Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Environment and Resources, studying the interplay between marine ecology and the economics of fisheries. Before returning to Oceana, he served for two years as the senior science manager for the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s influential Seafood Watch Program.
Geoff’s interdisciplinary research at Stanford focused on fisheries economics and marine ecology. Building on his foundation in ecology and conservation, his major research topics included economic valuation of ecological services, ocean zoning, alternative systems of ocean governance, and institutional causes of destructive resource use. Focusing on Pacific deep sea coral ecosystems, he is researching the fisheries production functions of marine habitats and how destructive fishing activities like bottom trawling affect their productive capacity. He combined theoretical and empirical methodologies from ecology and economics to develop frameworks to better understand the interactions between human activities and the marine ecosystem. Through his work at Stanford, Geoff hoped to develop and implement cost-effective policy solutions that are profitable, politically viable, and protect the features of the ocean that make it so productive.
Geoff Shester was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Environment and Resources at Stanford University. Before coming to Stanford, he received Highest Honors for his Bachelor’s Degree in both Biology and Environmental Studies at UC Santa Cruz. His undergraduate research topics included the natural history of California, the ecological impacts of global climate change, and the behavioral ecology of amphibians in the Costa Rican cloud forest. As an avid canoeist and wilderness guide, he has designed and led environmental education programs for young men and women in the Monterey Bay and the Canadian wilderness. Upon graduation, Geoff traveled to Anchorage, Alaska to intern at the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council where he worked with communities affected by the oil spill and developed communications materials for the Gulf of Alaska Ecosystem Monitoring and Research Program. He then moved to Juneau, Alaska to transition into a role as an environmental advocate working for the Pacific Regional Office of Oceana, an international marine conservation organization. At Oceana, he integrated biological and economic data to develop and present fishery management policy proposals to protect newly discovered deep sea coral ecosystems from destructive fishing practices along the Pacific coast of North America.