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Press Contact Bios John W. Day, Jr. is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences, School of the Coast & Environment at Louisiana State University, where he has taught since 1971. He has published extensively on the ecology and management of coastal and wetland ecosystems and has over 100 peer-reviewed publications. He is co-author (with M. Kemp, C. Hall, and A. Yáñez-Arancibia) of Estuarine Ecology, coeditor (with C. Hall) of Ecological Modeling in Theory and Practice, coeditor (with W. Conner) of The Ecology of the Barataria Basin, An Estuarine Profile, and coeditor (with A. Yáñez-Arancibia) of the Ecology of Coastal Ecosystems in the Southern Mexico: The Terminos Lagoon Region. Professor Day received his PhD in marine sciences and environmental sciences from the University of North Carolina in 1971 working with Dr. H.T. Odum. Since then, he has conducted extensive research on the ecology and management of the Mississippi Delta region and for the last 30 years, he has studied coastal ecosystems in Mexico. He was a visiting professor in the Institute of Marine Sciences of the National University of Mexico in 1978-1979, at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands during 1986, at the Laboratoire d'Ecologie, Unversité Claude Bernard in Arles France during 1992-93, and in the Department of Geography at Cambridge University in 2000-2001. He has also worked with the University of Campeche and the Institute of Ecology in Xalapa, Mexico. Since 1992, Professor Day has worked in the Mediterranean studying the impacts of climate change on wetlands in Venice Lagoon and in the Po, Rhone and Ebro deltas. He is presently working on using wetlands as a means of removing nitrogen from the Mississippi River. Dr. Day also served as a member of the hypoxia reassessment taskforce and published with Dr. William Mitsch an article in BioScience on approaches to removing nitrogen from the Mississippi River. He served as chair of the National Technical Review Committee reviewing the restoration program for the Mississippi delta and is currently active in delta restoration. He is the recipient of the Estuarine Research Federation Cronin Award for excellence in teaching in coastal sciences. Alan Lewitus is a Supervisory Oceanographer at the NOAA National Ocean Service (NOS) National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science (NCCOS) Center for Sponsored Coastal Ocean Research (CSCOR). He serves as Team Leader for the Ecosystem Stressors Research branch of CSCOR and oversees CSCOR programs in hypoxia (Coastal Hypoxia Research Program [CHRP], Northern Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia and Ecosystem Research Program [NGOMEX], harmful algal blooms (Ecology of Harmful Algal Blooms [ECOHAB], Monitoring and Event Response of Harmful Algal Blooms [MERHAB], and climate change (Sea Level Rise [SLR]). Since joining NOAA in October 2005, Dr. Lewitus has been closely involved in activities related to research and management of the northern Gulf hypoxic zone. He was Program Manager of NGOMEX, and helped coordinate the Gulf Hypoxia Science Symposium (New Orleans, April 2006), Hypoxia Effects on Living Resources Meeting (New Orleans, September 2006), Summit on Long-Term Monitoring of the Gulf of Mexico Hypoxic Zone: Developing the Implementation Plan for an Operational Observation System (Stennis, January 2007), and Ecological Impacts of Hypoxia on Living Resources Workshop (Stennis, March 2007), and is a member of the Coordinating Committee for the Mississippi River Watershed/Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia Task Force. His background is in phytoplankton ecology and physiology, with research interests that include hypoxia, coastal eutrophication, the ecology of harmful algal blooms, microbial food web dynamics, and the role and measurement of phytoplankton pigments, and he has over 80 peer-reviewed publications on these subjects. Prior to joining NOAA, Dr. Lewitus held a joint position with the University of South Carolina and SC Department of Natural Resources as Director of the SC Algal Ecology Laboratories and SC Harmful Algal Bloom Program. He holds a MS degree in Marine Sciences from Moss Landing Marine Laboratories with a Physical Oceanography discipline, and a PhD in Biological Oceanography from the MIT/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute joint program. Alan J. Lewitus, PhD |
