Seven Marine Scientists Win Pew Fellowships to Tackle Illegal Fishing and Coral Loss

The Pew Charitable Trusts

The ocean's problems are well documented. Illegal fishing strips fish stocks faster than they can recover. Coral reefs that took centuries to build are dying in years. Plastic pollution has reached the deepest trenches. What is less obvious is how to fix any of it, and that is where research comes in.

The Pew Charitable Trusts announced its 2026 class of marine fellows: seven scientists based in Australia, the United States, Canada, Japan, and Thailand who will each receive $150,000 over three years to pursue conservation-focused research. Their projects range from genetic techniques for tracing illegal fish catches to open-source tools for classifying nanoplastic pollution.

Tracking poachers with DNA

Shaili Johri of Stanford University will use fine-scale genetic analysis to strengthen seafood traceability and combat illegal fishing. By analyzing individual differences in animals' DNA, her work aims to pinpoint the geographic origins of traded species. The focus is reef sharks in the Western Indian Ocean, where she plans to develop low-cost, rapid genetic identification methods to detect illegal fishing hot spots.

Seafood fraud and illegal, unreported fishing cost the global economy billions of dollars annually and undermine conservation agreements. Genetic traceability could provide enforcement agencies with tools to verify catch origins at the point of sale, potentially closing gaps that paper-based tracking systems cannot.

Saving reefs through sexual reproduction

Suchana Apple Chavanich of Chulalongkorn University in Thailand will refine techniques for propagating corals through sexual reproduction and banking frozen coral sperm and eggs. Southeast Asia holds some of the world's richest coral diversity, but also some of its most threatened reefs. Current restoration efforts often rely on fragmenting existing colonies, which limits genetic diversity. Sexual propagation introduces more genetic variation, making restored populations more resilient to future stresses.

Cryopreservation of coral reproductive material adds a safety net: genetic diversity can be stored and used even if source populations decline further. The approach is analogous to seed banks for terrestrial plants, adapted for marine organisms that reproduce very differently.

Mapping kelp forests that survive heat waves

Nur Arafeh-Dalmau of the University of Queensland will identify and map resilient kelp forest ecosystems along the coastlines of California, Mexico, Peru, and Argentina. Using satellite imagery, ecological surveys, and environmental DNA, the project will analyze biodiversity patterns in kelp forests that have persisted through marine heat waves, with the goal of understanding what makes some kelp ecosystems more durable than others.

Kelp forests provide habitat for hundreds of species, sequester carbon, and buffer coastlines from wave energy. They are also declining in many regions due to warming waters. Identifying persistent forests and understanding their characteristics could guide where conservation investments are most likely to succeed.

Economics of conservation at the community level

Andres Cisneros-Montemayor of Simon Fraser University in Canada will develop a framework for understanding the social connections that shape economic decisions in fishing communities. Working with three communities in Sonora, Mexico, the project will map the layered interactions, from family networks to market access, that influence whether conservation incentives actually work.

Conservation programs often fail not because the science is wrong but because the incentive structures do not match the economic realities of the people they are trying to reach. This project aims to make conservation economically rational at the local level, rather than imposing top-down mandates that communities cannot sustain.

Algal blooms, fisheries governance, and plastic classification

The remaining three fellows tackle equally pressing problems. Matthew Gribble of UC San Francisco will apply statistical models to understand the dynamics of toxic algal blooms in southeast Alaska and Spain, where communities have been repeatedly affected. Namhee Kwon of Kansai University in Japan will analyze the effectiveness of shared fish stock agreements among South Korea, Japan, and China, examining whether existing legal frameworks are adequate for sustainable management. And Win Cowger of the Moore Institute for Plastic Pollution Research will enhance Open Specy, an open-source tool he developed for classifying different types of plastic pollution, expanding its capability to identify nanoplastics and plastic leachates in the marine environment.

Cowger's fellowship is the first awarded under the Pew-Gerstner Fellowship in Ocean Plastics Research, a new category focused specifically on solutions to marine plastic pollution. Gribble holds the second Pew-Hoover Fellowship in Marine and Biomedical Science, which supports work at the intersection of ocean and human health.

What fellowship programs can and cannot do

The 2026 cohort joins a community of more than 200 Pew marine fellow alumni. The program targets midcareer scientists selected by an international panel and provides not just funding but a network for collaboration and knowledge sharing. At $150,000 over three years, the grants are modest by research standards, typically enough to support a postdoctoral researcher and field expenses but not to fund large-scale operations.

The program's value lies less in the dollar amount than in the signal it sends and the connections it creates. Fellows gain visibility, peer networks, and a platform that can attract additional funding. Whether their individual projects succeed will depend on execution, local partnerships, and the willingness of policymakers to act on research findings, factors that no fellowship can guarantee.

The ocean's challenges are not waiting for solutions to arrive. But seven more scientists, in five countries, working on problems that range from molecular genetics to international law, represent incremental progress toward understanding what is broken and how it might be fixed.