Sofia Gabriel

Background

About Sofia Gabriel

I am a recent PhD graduate of the Quantitative Marine Science program jointly run by CSIRO and the University of Tasmania. My project tested methods for improved analysis of data on marine fauna from non-triangulating passive acoustic arrays, as well as analyzed the fine scale behavior of white sharks in the coastal nursery region off of Port Stephens, New South Wales, Australia based on data from a dense, non-triangulating passive acoustic array. I plan to apply that research to development of effective conservation and management policies for marine species.I received a Bachelor of Arts with a major in biology and a minor in dance from Swarthmore College in 2015. My honors biology thesis utilized video surveys of predators in the field as well as acoustic data to analyze prey patchiness at Gray’s Reef National Marine Sanctuary in Georgia, USA. The results of this work were reported in the Review of Scientific Research In and Around the Designated Research Area of Gray’s Reef National Marine Sanctuary in 2020.Prior to enrolling in a master’s program, I worked as an intern for the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth on a project in collaboration with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN looking at the impact of CITES listings of shark and ray species on Indonesian and Malaysian shark fisheries management policy, which resulted in a meeting with fisheries officials from 9 countries in South East Asia in April 2016. I travelled to the FAO headquarters in Rome to assist with the write-up of the results of that meeting, which were published in 2018 in the Fish and Fisheries journal (Friedman et al. 2018 “Examining the impact of CITES listing of sharks and rays in Southeast Asian Fisheries”).For my Master’s thesis work at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, I analyzed novel automated underwater vehicle data collected in collaboration with engineers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on the subsurface swimming behavior of white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) in the coastal waters off of Cape Cod, MA, USA and Guadalupe Island, Mexico.