Adel Heenan, Ph.D.

Adel Heenan is a lecturer and researcher at the School of Ocean Sciences at Bangor University in the United Kingdom. She models coral reef fishes in order to understand how coral reef ecosystems work and how humans interact with them.

In her previous job at NOAA, she worked for the Pacific Reef Assessment and Monitoring Program, a pan-Pacific long-term coral reef ecosystem monitoring team. She had the extraordinary opportunity to dive on some of the most remote and pristine coral reefs on the planet. Doing so gave her an appreciation for the need to understand natural variation in ecosystem state due to the physical environment, in order to better understand and manage human activities.

Adel has a strong interest in the information and data needs that can enable sustainable fisheries, and how we can put an ecosystem approach to fisheries management into practice. This includes implementing collaborative and integrated monitoring, as well as validating novel indicators for a whole system perspective.