Ian Taylor, Ph.D.

Background

Ian Taylor is a native of the Pacific Northwest. He received his B.A. in Mathematics from Carleton College in 1997. He then taught mathematics in rural Zimbabwe for the U.S. Peace Corps before returning to Seattle to attend graduate school at the University of Washington. Ian received a Ph.D. in the Quantitative Ecology and Resource Management in 2008 with researched focused on the population dynamics of Pacific Spiny Dogfish. Ian joined the Northwest Fisheries Science Center as a post-doc in 2008 working with Drs. Richard Methot and André Punt. In 2010, Ian joined the FRAM Population Ecology Program.

Current Research

Ian's research is on improving stock assessment methods for marine fish and applying these methods to understand the dynamics and support the sustainable management of west coast groundfish. He has contributed to stock assessments for Big Skate, Spiny Dogfish, Yelloweye Rockfish, Darkblotched Rockfish, China Rockfish, and Yellowtail Rockfish, as well as Shortspine Thornyhead and Longspine Thornyhead. He contributed to annual stock assessment for Pacific Hake from 2013 to 2018 as one of two U.S. representatives to the Joint Technical Committee, and is currently involved in a Management Strategy Evaluation for Pacific Hake.

Ian's primary responsibility is conducting stock assessments for west coast groundfish. Ian is also lead developer of r4ss, a software package in the language R used for working with the Stock Synthesis stock assessment platform. In 2015, he was awarded the NOAA Technology Transfer Award for this effort. Through this software package, which is available at https://github.com/r4ss/r4ss, Ian has worked to improve the efficiency of the stock assessment process and the ability for assessment authors explore and communicate the results of their models. Ian also continues to work with Dr. Methot on testing and expanding the Stock Synthesis assessment modeling platform.