New Marine Science Center Director Phil Yund Sees New Opportunities for Expanding Unique Facility's Research Role
 
Meeting Phil Yund, Ph.D., the newly hired director of the University of New England's Marine Science Education and Research Center, you might not guess that he knows a lot about sperm competition in sea squirts. In fact, he's an expert on the slippery sounding subject. Invertebrate fertilization is one of his funded research projects. (He knows some intimate details about sea urchins and blue mussels, too.)

Phil Yund, director of the Marine Science CenterDr. Yund, until recently, had been a full-time research marine scientist at the University of Maine-Orono.

"In general I'm an evolutionary ecologist," he says. "I work on the interface of ecology and evolutionary biology or population genetics. My focus for the last decade or so has been on fertilization processes."

After earning graduate degrees in biology from Yale University, Dr. Yund worked as a researcher at Brown University and the University of New Orleans. To gain administrative experience, he spent two years as an associate program director with the National Science Foundation.

He came to UNE to fill a primarily administrative position, though he will keep his hands in writing grants and doing research. He also has a faculty appointment in biology. "I've spent my entire life in marine labs," he notes. "I've always been interested in becoming a marine lab director."

Fulfilling Center's Research Mission
A big part of Dr. Yund's job will be to expand the research activity at the Marine Science Center, utilizing it to its full capacity. The Center opened in 2001.

"It is a fantastic facility," he says. "And this is a great opportunity to build something."

The Marine Science Center has three basic missions: education, outreach and research.

Dr. Yund observes that "we've taken an awful lot of steps toward meeting our goals for undergraduate education. Really, it's the other two areas that we haven't done very much with yet. My mission is to really beef up what we're doing in those two areas, while not sacrificing our educational goals."

Outside Researchers
As part of his plans to fulfill the Center's research potential, Dr. Yund plans to attract outside researchers from other institutions, especially during the summer months. There are only a couple dozen marine labs across the country, with many people based at in-land institutions. Dr. Yund believes our coastal location will be a magnet to these scientists.

In bringing in outside researchers, whether they be faculty or graduate students, the challenge will be to integrate them into the University's culture and intellectual life. This could be done by the visitors giving seminars, teaching courses and/or mentoring students.

A largely untapped resource, Dr. Yund posits, would be post-doctoral students, those budding academicians stuck in the gap between earning their Ph.D.s and their first faculty position. Many graduate students finish school and plan academic careers without ever having taught a course. Dr. Yund envisions a visiting scholar model that mixes research and teaching.

Dr. Yund would also like to expand the faculty base that works in the Center - UNE scientists not just from the Biology Department but from physics and chemistry and even the liberal arts, such as archeology.

Medical School Collaboration
One of the exciting potentials for research collaborations at UNE is between the marine scientists and the medical scientists in the College of Osteopathic Medicine. Dr. Yund sees a number of opportunities for collaboration in the investigation of microbial ecology and marine diseases, emerging areas at the national level. Many people are excited about the prospects of discovering or developing marine pharmaceuticals-drugs from the sea.

"Compounds are in marine organisms because they do something-play some role in their day-to-day lives," he notes. Some of these compounds may offer health benefits for humans.

Another obvious area of research potential is expanding the facility's Marine Animal Rehabilitation Center collaboration with research scientists. Seals, small cetaceans and eventually sea turtles will be in-house specimens.

Already, Kathy Ono, Ph.D., director of UNE's marine biology program, has garnered federal grant money to study how rehabilitated seals fare when returned to the ocean environment.

Other current research now associated with the Marine Science Center include College of Arts and Sciences Dean Jacque Carter's investigation of the migratory habits of stripped bass, medical professor David Koester's inquiry into how saltwater rays called skates "walk" along the ocean floor with leg-like appendages, and biology professor Stephan Zeeman's grant to establish a NASA Marine Remote Sensing Center, whose first project is to track the movements of right whales.

Commercial Fisheries Research
When not checking out the sex lives of sea creatures, Dr. Yund has some commercial fisheries-related research interests as well. One interesting question he's currently pursuing in a collaborative research project is whether, by dumping 70,000 metric tons of herring bait into the coastal waters of the Gulf of Maine each year, the activity of local lobster fisherman would more accurately be described as farming lobsters than fishing for them. Lobster harvests have been a record levels for several years, and research has shown that this huge addition to the natural food supply has increased the growth rate of lobsters. It is still unclear, however, precisely how much human invention has influenced this growth.

Dr. Yund remarks that such activity "blurs the distinction between wild fishing and aquaculture-it's a continuum."

"I'm very exited to join UNE," says Dr. Yund. "It's an interesting institution, really making an effort to take on more of a research mission, across the board."

(Press release issued March 29, 2003)

   
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