I grew up on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland and learned to love the water and fish at a very young age.  After high school, I moved to Wilmington, North Carolina to pursue a BS in marine biology at UNCW.  I graduated from UNCW with University and Departmental Honors in 2002.  My honors thesis investigated the potential effects of maximal growth on the susceptibility of juvenile bay anchovy to predation.  This required the examination of otoliths from bay anchovy recovered from bluefish stomachs and making a comparison between the increment widths (growth) of those otoliths with the increment widths of free-ranging, bay anchovy that had avoided bluefish predation.  

        After graduation, I took a year off from school to work with the City of Wilmington's Environmental Services Division as a QC chemist in  the municipal drinking water and wastewater lab.  During this time, Dr. Scharf was beginning as a professor at UNCW and establishing funding and resources for future projects.

       In the fall of 2003, I officially joined Dr. Scharf's Fisheries Ecology Lab as an MS candidate in marine biology working on the population dynamics of juvenile red drum in North Carolina.  My thesis research was field intensive, and involved two years of regular seine collections and a two month caging experiment.  In the lab, I completed microstructural analysis of red drum otoliths as well as gut content analyses.  I am currently finishing my thesis, which will consist of two chapters.  The first describes the caging study we conducted during the 2004 fall recruitment period and demonstrates spatial and temporal variation in post-settlement growth.  The second chapter describes the otolith microstructural work and the patterns of growth variation that we observed in free-ranging fish over 2 years of sampling.

    Jason currently works for PPD pharmaceuticals in Wilmington, NC.