Maxwell
Named Knauss Fellow
June
1, 2007
Louisiana
State University doctoral candidate Vanessa Maxwell has been
selected as a 2008 Knauss Fellow. She was nominated for the
fellowship by the Louisiana Sea Grant College Program.
Maxwell
is the daughter of Sandra and Virgil Maxwell of Franklin, Tenn.
She is a 1997 graduate of Franklin High School in Franklin,
Tenn. She earned her bachelor’s degree in marine biology
and aquaculture from Florida Tech, her maser’s degree
in fisheries and allied aquaculture from Auburn University,
and she completed her Ph.D. in wildlife and fisheries sciences
with a minor in environmental planning and management at LSU.
She will receive her doctorate in August 2007. During her doctoral
studies, she assisted Louisiana Sea Grant researcher John Supan
with developing an aquaculture park to demonstrate longline
oyster farming in coastal Louisiana.
Longlines
are an off-bottom cultivation technique, used widely in Australia,
in which oysters are grown in flexible plastic mesh bags suspended
from a cable. Maxwell’s graduate assistantship on the
project was funded by Sea Grant’s Gulf Oyster Industry
Program.
The Knauss
Fellowship, sponsored by the National Sea Grant College Program,
provides a unique educational experience to students who have
an interest in ocean and coastal resources and national policy
decisions affecting those resources. The program matches graduate
students with hosts in legislative or executive branch offices
in Washington, D.C., for one year.
In December,
Maxwell will decide in which host office she will work, and
the fellowship will begin in February 2008. She is one of 52
Knauss Fellows for 2008.
Since its
establishment in 1968, Louisiana Sea Grant has worked to promote
stewardship of the state’s coastal resources through a
combination of research, education and outreach programs critical
to the cultural, economic and environmental health of Louisiana’s
coastal zone. Louisiana Sea Grant, based at LSU, is part of
the National Sea Grant Program, a network of 32 university-based
programs in each of the U.S. coastal and Great Lakes states
and Puerto Rico.
