Martin Loefflad Appointed New FMA Division Director
Martin Loefflad was appointed Director of the AFSC’s Fisheries Monitoring and Analysis (FMA) Division effective January 2008. Martin replaces Bill Karp who took the position of AFSC Deputy Director. Martin had served as FMA Deputy since the inception of the Division in 2005 and is well familiar with the challenges of leading the FMA Division.
Martin received a B.S. in biology from Washington State University (1982) and was drawn to the North Pacific by the opportunities available in the Foreign Fisheries Observer Program working aboard Soviet fishing trawlers in the Bering Sea. He continued fisheries field work in the Bering Sea and off the West Coast as the North Pacific groundfish fishery evolved from foreign to domestic. He clearly remembers being in Dutch Harbor waiting to board a domestic trawler when the media reported the grounding of the Exxon Valdez.
Martin took his first job with NOAA Fisheries Service opening the Observer Program’s field station in Kodiak, Alaska, where he worked extensively with local industry to implement the now mandatory domestic observer program. He then moved to a post working in the NMFS Alaska Regional Office on in-season management issues, particularly developing with many others the monitoring systems used for the community development quota (CDQ) fisheries. He returned to the Observer Program in 1995 at the AFSC in Seattle where he has been responsible for many of the innovations in the program. While with the Center, Martin continued his education completing a Master of Public Administration degree from Seattle University in 2006.
Martin’s professional interests are varied and include developing and integrating technologies into fisheries management systems, catch estimation processes, fishing vessel and observer safety, and collaboration with constituents to continually improve our management systems. He is a member of NOAA Fisheries National Observer Program Advisory Team and works with various North Pacific Fishery Management Council committees.
