Meet The Scientist: Ed Melvin

Ed Melvin gets a lot of odd looks when he tells people what he does for a living. That's because he hangs out with fishermen, but he doesn't catch fish. In fact, he's more interested in designing fishing equipment that won't catch things.

Melvin is a scientist with Washington Sea Grant Program in Seattle, Wash. For more than ten years, he's worked with fishermen in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska to help them figure out ways to reduce seabird bycatch. When he first arrived at Sea Grant, fishing operations in Alaskan waters killed thousands of birds every year. But Melvin, with help from the fishermen and other scientists, thought of some relatively easy ways to keep birds out of fishing nets and off fishhooks. Those ideas have since helped reduce bycatch in Alaska by eight times.

Melvin's interest in all things ocean started with his family's trips to the Long Island coast when he was a boy in New York. "I spent a lot of time on the beach," he says, "staring at the sea." He went to college in Pennsylvania and majored in zoology, but was "one of those people who had a hard time deciding what to do."

After college, Melvin went to southern California where, among other things, he worked for a hardware manufacturer.[E1] But after a while he missed working with biology, and eventually he went back to school. "My career path has definitely been more like a thread than a road," he says.

Melvin has continued to follow that thread. (He even found that a strip of white netting in the top of a fishing net will keep birds from swimming into it!) "I've always gravitated towards things that are applied and practical," he says. "It's satisfying to help a fishery become sustainable."