QUIETING WORKSHOP THREE

Brandon Southall, Ph.D. is a Research Associate with the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Duke University. He obtained Masters and Ph.D. degrees from UCSC, studying communication, hearing, and the effects of noise on seals and sea lions. He directed the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Ocean Acoustics Program and has been centrally involved in developing systematic noise exposure criteria for marine mammals and the first-ever acoustic guidelines for the agency. He founded and runs SEA, a research and consulting small business conducting and applying science to support environmental management assessments and environmentally responsible development. He is the former director of NOAA’s Ocean Acoustics Program where he helped develop acoustic exposure criteria for marine mammals.  He continues to study the behavioral responses of marine mammals to human produced sounds.

Dr. Leila Hatch is a marine ecologist at NOAA's Office of National Marine Sanctuaries. She studies the ways that animals use sound underwater and supports the development of tools to reduce the impacts of noise produced by human activities on marine environments. Dr. Hatch serves as a lead for several national-scale sound monitoring and policy initiatives for NOAA, including NOAA's Ocean Noise Strategy, Noise Reference Station Network, Sanctuary Soundscape Monitoring Project and Passive Acoustic Monitoring Archive. Dr. Hatch began working for NOAA after serving as a John A. Knauss legislative fellow with the U.S. House of Representatives' Resources Committee. She received a doctoral degree from Cornell University in evolutionary biology, where her research used molecular genetic and acoustic tools to identify population boundaries among Northern Hemisphere fin whales. Prior to her graduate work, Dr. Hatch participated in global research programs to study potential impacts from a variety of human activities on whale and dolphin populations.