Pamela M. Mace Biography
Pamela Mace was born in Nelson, New Zealand. She completed a B.Sc (Hons) degree in Zoology at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch in 1975. After a short period working in Australia for the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, she moved to Canada to begin a Ph.D. program with C. S. (Buzz) Holling at what was then the Institute of Animal Resource Ecology at UBC. Her thesis was on predator-prey functional responses and predation by sculpins and birds on juvenile salmon. Part-way through her thesis, Dr. Holling left to take up a position in Austria and Carl Walters became her supervisor. However, Dr. Walters went on sabbatical before she was finished, and Peter Larkin became her advisor and mentor during the final stages of her graduate program.
After graduating in 1983, Dr. Mace went to the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Halifax, Nova Scotia and completed a postdoctoral fellowship on the Bay of Fundy herring purse seine fishery. She returned to New Zealand in 1986, shortly before New Zealand implemented its comprehensive Individual Transferable Quota (ITQ) system. There she spent two years studying ITQs and deep-water species such as orange roughy. Her research led to the discovery that orange roughy have unusually low productivity with slow growth and high age of sexual maturity. Subsequently, Dr. Mace moved to the United States and joined the staff of the New England Fishery Management Council, where her duties involved the assessment and management of herring, scallops, swordfish, and groundfish. In 1993, she began working for the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) on the assessment and management of Atlantic tunas, swordfish, sharks, and billfish, first in a management division and then in a research division. In late 1998, she took up her current position as the national stock assessment coordinator in the NMFS Office of Science and Technology.
In the last several years, Dr. Mace has been heavily involved in the national and international development of precautionary approaches and harvest control rules for fisheries management; the development and implementation of national standards for overfishing definitions and rebuilding plans in U.S. fisheries; research, assessment, and management of highly migratory species, including participation in scientific meetings of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT); FAO and U.S. initiatives on the management of fishing capacity; and various science quality assurance projects for reviewing and improving U.S. fish stock assessments. She was the invited keynote speaker at the Second World Fisheries Congress in Brisbane, Australia in 1996.
