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Now
I am a Fish and Wildlife Biologist IV in the Fish Program’s Intergovernmental Ocean Policy Division at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW), where I serve as principal investigator and lead of the Coastal Shellfish Unit. The unit has 16 staff and eight program budgets totaling $1.8M. Our work supports commercial shellfish fisheries worth more than $120M a year and eight recreational fisheries on Washington’s outer coast, including Pacific razor clam and coastal Dungeness crab.
Day to day, that means designing monitoring programs, building quantitative assessments of harvest, effort, and biological data, and turning the results into management recommendations for agency leadership, policymakers, tribal co-managers, and the Fish and Wildlife Commission. Much of the analysis behind that work is public on GitHub.
Research background
I have spent more than 14 years working at the interface of ecophysiology and genomics to understand how climate change affects marine organisms, especially commercially and ecologically important shellfish. My research pairs physiological assays (metabolic rate, biomechanics, stress tolerance) with genomic and epigenomic approaches (RNA-seq, bisulfite sequencing, SNP analysis) to identify the mechanisms behind responses to ocean acidification, marine heatwaves, and hypoxia. That work has produced 20 peer-reviewed publications, including articles in Nature Climate Change and Global Change Biology, and has been featured in The Atlantic, Scientific American, and Popular Science.
Research Scientist, University of Washington and NOAA (2020-2023). In a joint appointment with the Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean, & Ecosystem Studies, I worked with Steven Roberts in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and Mackenzie Gavery at the NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center. I led projects with state and federal agencies, tribes, and industry on why triploid Pacific oysters die during marine heatwaves, how hatchery conditioning can improve seed survival, which genes predict strong attachment in farmed mussels, and how gene expression relates to behavior in sockeye salmon. I helped secure funding from NOAA, USDA, and the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission for this work. See Research.
Postdoctoral training in biomedicine (2018-2020). At the Mayo Clinic Department of Physiology and Biomedical Engineering and the Center for Cellular and Molecular Therapeutics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, I trained in quantitative molecular assays, stem cell culture, genome editing, and large-scale gene expression analysis. I joined those labs to bring those tools back to marine species facing climate change.
Ph.D., University of Washington (2018). As an NSF Graduate Research Fellow with Emily Carrington, I studied how ocean pH, oxygen, and temperature change the byssal threads that mussels use to attach underwater. The dissertation, Mussel attachment in a dynamic ocean: an ecomechanical perspective, drew on ecology, biochemistry, materials science, and gene expression. It led to papers in Nature Climate Change, Biofouling, Journal of the Royal Society Interface, Conservation Physiology, and the Journal of Shellfish Research. Before graduate school, I designed, commissioned, and operated the Ocean Acidification Environmental Laboratory at Friday Harbor Laboratories, including 16 flow-through mesocosms with programmable temperature, pH, and oxygen control.
B.Sc., Gonzaga University (2010). Biology, with a concentration in biological research methods, supported by a Howard Hughes Medical Institute undergraduate research fellowship.
Open science
I share analyses as they happen. Code and data live on GitHub, and laboratory work from 2020 to 2023 is documented in an open online lab notebook, alongside how-to guides on ANOVA in R and coding with gptstudio.
Contact
Email: mattgeorgephd@gmail.com
Location: Olympia, Washington, USA