Advisory Board

The Advisory Board (AB) consists of members that were appointed by the Organizing Committee. Duties of the AB include, but are not limited to, making recommendations regarding plenary speakers and special focuses for the conference, soliciting nominations for awards, and reviewing the submitted oral and poster abstracts.

Kurt Gernerd Kurt A. Gernerd, Co-Chair
Kurt is the Assistant Director of Engineering, Technology and Geospatial Services for the U.S. Forest Service in Washington, D.C. He has been involved in fish passage design beginning in the 1980’s with the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Reclamation; and for the past 12 years with the Forest Service focusing on engineering solutions in stream simulation design at road-stream crossings. Kurt has a B.S. in fisheries biology and hydrology, M.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering and post-graduate studies at M.I.T. in advanced hydraulic systems design.
Dan Shively Dan Shively, Co-Chair
Dan is the National Fisheries Program Leader for the USDA Forest Service. He has been a fisheries biologist with the federal government for 26 years, much of that in the Pacific Northwest. Dan oversees the Fisheries and Aquatic Ecology Program for the Forest Service, spanning over 193 million acres of national forests and grasslands including some of the best quality freshwater habitat remaining in the country important for conserving biodiversity as well as providing for recreational, commercial, and subsistence fisheries.
Lee Baumgartner Lee Baumgartner
Lee has lived and breathed fish passage research for over 16 years and has worked in government, universities and private industry. His research has been in several broad areas, including fish passage and fish migration, dietary interactions among native fish species, the impact of human disturbance on aquatic ecosystems and, more recently, mitigating hydropower impacts on tropical rivers in South East Asia. Dr Baumgartners' work has also focused on developing innovative methods for assessment (such as the adaptation of sonar technology to migration studies) and improving existing fish collection techniques. Much of his work is applied and has fed back into adaptive management strategies which have resulted in state and national policy fish passage development. Lee presently manages over $3M in research projects and has active global collaborations.
Alison Bowden Alison Bowden
Alison's work focuses on developing and implementing innovative science and policy tools to protect and restore rivers and estuaries, as well as linking freshwater and marine conservation for migratory fish. She works on a wide range of policy issues including transportation, environmental permitting, water resource management and fisheries management. Alison is also a member of the NOAA River Herring Technical Expert Working Group, ASMFC Shad and River Herring Advisory Panel, and Taunton River Wild and Scenic Stewardship Council.
Jason Dunham Jason Dunham
Jason is an Aquatic Ecologist with the US Geological Survey, Forest and Rangeland Ecosystem Science Center in Corvallis, Oregon. His current research is focused on climate and land use change, species conservation, biological invasions, and development of tools to engage managers and stakeholders in science applications. Jason's background in fish passage has involved a number of contributions, including effects of stream-road crossings on native fishes, nonnative fish invasions, and social and economic trade-offs.
Carlos Garcia de Leaniz Carlos Garcia de Leaniz
Carlos holds a Chair in Aquatic BioSciences at Swansea University (UK), where he teaches on Conservation of Aquatic Resources and leads the Centre for Sustainable Aquatic Research (CSAR) at the Department of BioSciences. His background is on fish biology, with expertise on Behavioural Ecology, Conservation, Invasion Biology, and Aquaculture. He has more than 35 years experience working with salmonids as model systems to understand how organisms adapt and respond to change. Carlos pioneered the removal of weirs and dams in the salmon rivers of N. Spain, more than 20 years ago, and currently leads AMBER, a large EU-funded project that aims to apply principles of adaptive management to restore stream connectivity across Europe.
Lisiane Hahn Lisiane Hahn
Lisiane is a Brazilian biologist and technical director of Neotropical Environmental Consulting Company. Her work and research interests in the last 15 years are focus on the investigation of fish movements in South American rivers, especially in the Amazon basin, employing technologies such as radio and acoustic telemetry. She also leads the studies about the performance of fish passages in largest dams in Brazil. Lisiane has M.S. in Zoology and PhD in Freshwater Ecology.
Kenneth Ham Kenneth Ham
Kenneth leads the development of fish passage, survival and behavior research at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The tools he developed to extract information from large sonar and telemetry datasets have enabled large and precise evaluations of structures and operations for fish passage. He also lead the task force to incorporate environmental sustainability into the Hydropower Vision document produced by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Wind and Water Power Technologies Office.
Martyn Lucas Martyn Lucas
Martyn is an Associate Prof. at Durham University in the north of England. He has worked on fish spatial ecology, behaviour, ecophysiology and ecohydraulics for 30 years and lead-authored the book Migration of Freshwater Fishes. He is CoI on the EU funded project Adaptive Management of Barriers in European Rivers (AMBER).
Erin McCombs Erin McCombs
Erin is the Associate Conservation Director with American Rivers, a national river advocacy non-profit, based in the Asheville, NC field office. Erin works in American Rivers’ Southeast Region, largely in the Carolinas and Tennessee, to provide program development, technical assistance, project management, and general guidance in the planning, development and implementation of projects like dam removals. Erin has a M.S. degree in biology and a particular interest in freshwater mussels.
Paulo Pompeu Paulo Pompeu
Paulo is an Ecology professor at Federal University of Lavras, Brazil. He has been working on fish diversity patterns in South American rivers, the effects of land use on stream’s fish assemblages and the effects of dams on the aquatic fauna. Specific applications also include the evaluation of fish passes as a conservation strategy in tropical rivers, improving habitat and connectivity restoration strategies, including dam decommissioning, and fish migration studies, often using telemetry.
Javier Sanz-Ronda Javier Sanz-Ronda
Javier is a Hydraulics Professor at the Forestry Engeneering School of Palencia (University of Valladolid, Spain). He has been working in fish passes desing for more than fifteen years. His research focus on fish passes ecohydraulics and evaluation. He also coordinates the scientific group GEA (Applied Ecohydraulics Group).
Eva B. Thorstad Eva B. Thorstad
Eva has been working with fish ecology, habitat use and migrations in freshwater, estuaries and marine systems in Norway and several other European, African and Asian countries. Her main expertise is in management and exploitation and of fish resources including catch advice, effects of hydropower development, migration barriers, salmon farming, pollution and other human impacts. Methodological expertise in electronic telemetry tagging and other fish monitoring methods. She is a research scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA) and adjunct professor at the University of Tromsø in Norway.
Christian Tudorache Christian Tudorache
Christian has been working on the ecology and physiology of fish migration all over Europe, in Canada and the US. As an academic researcher he is interested in environmental stress and the physiology and biomechanics of fish swimming. As a consultant in the private industry he helps to design, build and manage fish passages and create innovative methods for mitigating human disturbance of free migration. He is involved in various training and research networks, invited speaker and lecturer at international conferences and teaching programs, and entertains a large global network of research collaborations. Currently, Christian is a senior scientist and lecturer at Leiden University, The Netherlands.
Hirokazu Urabe Hirokazu Urabe
Hirokazu is a senior researcher at the Salmon and Freshwater Fisheries Research Institute in Hokkaido, Japan. His work focuses on population recovery of salmonids, especially masu salmon, through improvement of migration barriers. Recently, he has been interested in effects of changes in material flow by low-head dam removal on freshwater and marine ecosystem.
Teppo Vehanen Teppo Vehanen
Teppo Vehanen is a senior researcher at the National Resources Institute Finland, Helsinki, Finland. He currently also chairs the Technical and Scientific Committee of EIFAAC. He has been working with regulated rivers for more than twenty years, and currently focuses on connectivity issues. His research interests include also Water Framework Directive, especially evaluating biological responses to human influences on riverine fish community. Related interests include experimental studies, mainly with behavioral issues concerning salmonid fishes.