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Expedition Team
 Chris Caldow
NOAA's Center for Coastal Monitoring and Assessment's Biography Branch
Senior Scientist and Project Manager
Chris Caldow is a Senior Scientist and Project Manager with NOAA's Biogeography Branch and is one of the principle investigators for this mission. Chris has a Bachelor's degree in Aquatic Biology from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a Masters degree in Biology from the University of Houston. Since 2000, he has been assisting the Branch in carrying out its mission to supply marine resource managers with critical information on the distribution of the living marine resources they manage. During this cruise, Chris will be overseeing day-to-day operations of the diving and mapping efforts to ensure that the cruise is a success and project objectives are met.
 Randy Clark
NOAA's Center for Coastal Monitoring and Assessment's Biography Branch
Worked for NOAA's Biogeography Branch for 10 years
Randy Clark obtained a B.S. and M.S. from Texas A&M-Galveston in Marine Biology and Fisheries Ecology. His main interests include fish populations and their relationships with benthic/pelagic habitats, coral reef fish distributions in the Caribbean, deep-sea fish populations, and coral biology. He has worked for NOAA's Biogeography Branch for 10 years.
 Bryan Costa
NOAA's Center for Coastal Monitoring and Assessment's Biography Branch
GIS and Remote Sensing specialist
Bryan Costa graduated cum laude from Middlebury College in 2003 with a joint degree in Biology and Environmental Studies. After working in China and later for the Census Bureau, he joined NOAA's Center for Costal Monitoring & Assessment's Biogeography Branch as a GIS and Remote Sensing specialist. Since joining NOAA, he has worked on various projects that have ranged from characterizing the seafloor using multibeam echosounders in the U.S. Virgin Islands to developing multivariate models for cetaceans in the Gulf of Maine. On this mission, he will be tasked with correcting the acoustic backscatter for geometric and radiometric distortions.
 Kimberly Foley
NOAA's Center for Coastal Monitoring and Assessment's Biography Branch
Marine Biologist
Kimberly Foley is a Marine Biologist with the Center for Coastal Monitoring and Assessment's Biogeography Branch. Kim is an active diver with CCMA, conducting fish and habitat surveys for several characterization and monitoring projects throughout the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Kim completed her master's degree at the University of Puerto Rico, where she was working on a CCMA project investigating fish and habitat associations across cross shelf habitats. Her research interests continue to focus on fish and habitat associations, particularly in zones of dynamic physical oceanographic patterns. As a result of her experience in Puerto Rico, Kim is fluent in Spanish and has maintained a strong network on the island, skills that have aided our missions. Stationed in Beaufort, North Carolina, Kim is serves as a liaison between the two NCCOS branches of CCMA and CCFHR on projects in similar geographic regions.
 Emma Hickerson
NOAA's Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary
Research Coordinator
Emma Hickerson has been the Research Coordinator for the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary for 11 years. Her job during the mission will be to coordinate operations between the ship and the scientists, and make sure everyone knows what they are doing, and when they are doing it. During the SCUBA operations at the East and West Banks she will be conducting fish and benthic surveys. When she dives at Bright Bank she will be assisting in collecting coral cores from a non-living finger coral. The cores will eventually be carbon dated to help reconstruct the history of the Gulf of Mexico.
 Charlie Menza
NOAA's Center for Coastal Monitoring and Assessment's Biography Branch
Spatial Ecologist
Charlie Menza is a spatial ecologist in the Biogeography Team of NOAA's Center for Coastal Monitoring and Assessment. He has a Bachelor of Science from McGill University in Biology and Environmental Sciences and a Master of Science from the University of Toronto in Zoology. For the past three years Charlie has been working on projects which merge spatial modeling, geographic information systems, and statistics to better understand the linkages between reef fish and benthic habitats, and to produce more efficient reef fish sampling methods. He is also a NOAA diver and spends several weeks a year conducting reef fish surveys in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. He is currently working on marine assessments of the island of Vieques and the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, deep water benthic habitat classification systems and papers on deep coral reef ecology and on sampling designs. On this mission Charlie will be developing the sampling design and surveying fish.
 Dr. Mark Monaco
Dr. Mark Monaco is a marine biologist with NOAA's National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science. He has been with NOAA 23 years and for the past 12 years has directed NOAA's Biogeography Branch. This program focuses on defining species distributions, mapping habitats, and determining the strength of coupling between species and important habitats. Prior to coming to NOAA, he managed The Ohio State University's Franz Theodore Stone Laboratory on Lake Erie, the oldest freshwater field station in the Nation. Dr. Monaco holds a B.S. in Fisheries Science and a M.S. in Environmental Biology from Ohio State and received his Ph.D in Marine Biology from the University of Maryland. His current research interests address coral reef ecology, mapping of coral reef ecosystems, and defining and evaluating the efficacy of marine protected areas.
 Simon James Pittman
Simon James Pittman is a marine ecologist with a Ph.D. in marine spatial ecology and an M.Sc. in Environmental Sciences & Management, with specialized skills in remote sensing, GIS, habitat mapping, spatial statistics, multivariate statistics and predictive modeling. His main body of work focuses on developing a landscape ecology approach to shallow water tropical marine ecosystems, with special emphasis on the ecology of fish and crustaceans. His responsibilities at NOAA involve coordinating biogeographic assessments for the National Marine Sanctuaries, mapping and statistical analysis of ecological patterns to enhance understanding of the marine environment and support science-based management.
 Kimberly Woody
NOAA's Center for Coastal Monitoring and Assessment's Biography Branch
Marine Biologist
Kimberly Woody is a marine biologist with the Biogeography Branch of NOAA's Center for Coastal Monitoring and Assessment (CCMA). She has a Bachelor of Science degree from Berry College, Rome, GA and a Master of Science degree from Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. For the past two years, Kim has coordinated the Biogeography Branch's shallow water monitoring efforts to characterize and assess the effectiveness of marine protected areas in the US Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. She is currently continuing the coordination of several field missions each year utilizing SCUBA diving as a tool for data collection. Kim is a NOAA Divemaster and will serve as Lead Diver on this cruise.
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