Mark Maunder's Stock Assessment Research

Mark Maunder is the Head of the Stock Assessment Program at the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC), located in La Jolla, California. He is also co-founder of the Center for the Advancement of Population Assessment Methodology (CAPAM) and co-founder and past president of the AD Model Builder (ADMB) Foundation. Mark co-ordinates, and often chairs, the CAPAM workshop series on fisheries stock assessment methodology.

Marks research focuses on population assessment methodology, with particular focus on fisheries stock assessment. He completed his Phd at the University of Washington under the supervision of Professor Ray Hilborn, where he pioneered the integration of tagging data into stock assessment models. Since then his research has covered a range of topics and he has collaborated with a wide variety of researchers as outlined on these pages.

Mark started his career at the New Zealand Fishing Industry Board where his supervisor Paul Starr, who took a chance at hiring a fresh inexperienced MSc graduate, set the stage for the rest of Mark's career. Professor Andre Punt has been his longtime mentor. Dave Fournier provided inspiration on what could be done to improve stock assessment while collaboration with Kevin Piner provided constant motivation throughout the years. His supervisors Rick Deriso and Alex Aires da-Silva have provided the direction and freedom to conduct the research required to improve stock assessments for tunas in the eastern Pacific Ocean and stock assessment methodology in general. Many other people from various backgrounds, too numerous to mention, have influenced Mark's thinking over the years. Many of them co-authors of the publications listed here.

Mark is originally from New Zealand and is a keen recreation fisherman. Both his Masters thesis and PhD dissertation were on New Zealand snapper, the main recreational species in New Zealand.