UNH Professor’s Love of the Ocean Brings Him on Course to Help White House
ROSENBERG
New Hampshire Union Leader
Joseph Markman
Boston University Washington News Service
11/12/09
WASHINGTON – University of New Hampshire professor Andrew Rosenberg’s trip to the Galapagos Islands to survey sea turtles when he was 17 may not have sparked his desire to work on the ocean, but it certainly helped cement it.
“His focus was always on the water and on marine stuff, ever since I met him,” said Peter Thomas, a friend of Rosenberg’s since high school and now an official with the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission.
“As his friend I probably didn’t realize how intense he was academically,” Thomas said.
Rosenberg, a marine sciences professor and former deputy director of the National Marine Fisheries Service, is working as a temporary adviser to a White House task force on the use of the nation’s coastal waters and the Great Lakes. The Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force, which President Obama created in June, is working to set rules for marine spatial planning, which many officials refer to as ocean zoning, to deal with disagreements among commercial, recreational and conservation interests competing for use of the nation’s waters.
Sailing with his father at an early age helped Rosenberg develop a strong connection to the sea.
“I always knew that I wanted to work on the ocean,” he said in an interview at a Washington hotel between meetings of the nonprofit environmental group Conservation International. “I liked science. I definitely didn’t want to be a lawyer like my father and my sister and my brother.”
Rosenberg, who is 54, was born in Boston and grew up in Newton, Mass., where his father, brother and sister live today. His mother, a speech therapist, died a few years ago.
As a teenager visiting his family’s home on Cape Cod, Rosenberg said he found himself fascinated with marine biology when he helped a neighbor analyze invertebrate samples and examine oil dispersion on a man-made lake.
That neighbor was Dr. Shields Warren, known for leading a team to Japan after World War II to study and aid atomic-bomb survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Though the experiments were “small-scale stuff,” Rosenberg said, the time working with Shields was very influential.
Rosenberg graduated with a bachelor of science degree in fisheries biology in 1978 from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and earned a master’s in oceanography in 1980 from Oregon State University and a doctorate in biology in 1984 from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia.
He will be working in Washington part-time, commuting back home to Gloucester, Mass., his wife, Marian, and his UNH graduate students for part of the week. He is also taking on the position of senior vice president for science and knowledge at Conservation International, where he will oversee 70 scientists in 40 countries.
Paul Sandifer, who served with Rosenberg on the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy, said Rosenberg is a good negotiator.
“He tends to push for as much conservation in order to sustain a resource,” Sandifer said. “But he’s also very realistic about what we need to do to make sure people still get to use the resource.”
The commission’s findings are now being used to help the Ocean Policy Task Force, which Rosenberg will be advising, to set up a transparent, public process for deciding how the ocean can be used, depending on the environmental, economic and social effects of proposed projects. Rosenberg said that there are a number of federal agencies that deal with the ocean and that the task force will try to figure out how they can work together.
Lynn Rutter, a program coordinator at UNH’s Ocean Process and Analysis Laboratory, said that she started working in the field just as ecosystem-based environmental management first began to take off, and that it has thrived in large part because of Rosenberg’s efforts.
Rutter has worked with Rosenberg both as a student and a co-worker at the university, and said she is constantly amazed by his ability to connect with and drive students to succeed.
“He gets people to really work to their greatest potential with a lot of autonomy,” Rutter said. “It’s a very special skill to both be able to personally do well with people and have success with [analysis].”
“I don’t know how he manages to do everything he does,” said Lindsey Fong, a UNH graduate student who studied for a degree in natural resources under Rosenberg. “He is the reason for all my success in graduate school.”
Christine M. Glunz, a spokeswoman for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said in a statement, “His experience as a member of the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy, as well as his expertise on many relevant ocean-related issues, makes him a valuable addition.”
At the end of the year, when his advising duties come to an end, Rosenberg will take a leave of absence from the university and continue to work in Washington for Conservation International, where, he joked, he is “in charge of all knowledge” though not necessarily wisdom.
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