The aim
An Honorary Fellowship is a prestigious award that WorldFish bestows on prominent international science leaders with the aim of connecting them to the core of WorldFish’s research, research staff and national partners.
Through this fellowship, a WorldFish Honorary Fellow will contribute to WorldFish’s mission to strengthen livelihoods and enhance food and nutrition security by improving fisheries and aquaculture globally.
The criteria
An Honorary Fellow will be a person recognized as having made an outstanding contribution to their chosen field; a field that will be directly relevant to WorldFish mission and research impacts. The Fellow will have outstanding academic qualifications, substantial research publications and a proven commitment to research embedded in and contributing to development.
The expectation
During the fellowship period, an Honorary Fellow is expected to contribute to the production of high impact paper and reports to make our work more accessible to influential actors, responsive to development needs and impactful in terms of research and development outcomes. The Fellow will also provide thought leadership to the senior executive, contribute to WorldFish’s research direction and impact pathways, function as a mentor to WorldFish’s research leadership and act as an ambassador for WorldFish.
The appointment
The Director General will make direct appointments following consultation with WorldFish’s research leadership and the Executive Team for a period of up to 3 years.
Marine and Environmental Affairs, College of the Environment, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA
Eddie Allison received his PhD in Fisheries Science from the University of Liverpool, UK, working with the Isle of Man’s scallop fishing fleet. After graduating, he worked for the UK Department for International Development in Malawi for four years. For most of his career since, he has combined university-based teaching and reearch with secondments and consultancies to various international organizations, including the Global Environmental Facility International Waters program in Lake Tanganyika in the late 1990s, and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, where he worked on the Sustainable Fisheries Livelihoods Program in West and Central Africa in the early 2000s. His research centers on the human connection to natural resources. His primary areas of focus are 1) the contribution of fisheries and aquaculture to food and nutrition security and coastal livelihoods, 2) governance of small-scale fisheries and aquaculture production and the human rights of fishers, and 3) the vulnerability and adaptation to climate change of people dependent on marine and freshwater resources. His work spans the globe, having held positions in the field of fisheries and aquaculture management and development in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Oceania, Latin America and Europe, as researcher or technical and policy advisor for various international organizations. He has held faculty appointments at the University of East Anglia, UK, and was the director of Policy, Economics, and Social Science at the WorldFish Center in Malaysia from 2007 to 2010. He has been at the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs at the University of Washington since 2013. From 2012 to 2014 he worked with a legal team to support the claims of the Bodo Communities in the Niger Delta for compensation for oil spills that had destroyed their fishing grounds. Eddie characterizes himself as an interdisciplinary scholar, and works in close collaboration with other academics (anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, economists, ecologists and others) as well as fisherfolk and resource stewards in communities, governments and firms.
Email: eha1@uw.edu
Webpages: www.marinalab.org, smea.uw.edu
John Kurien has a background in statistics, business management and a Ph.D in social sciences. After a short stint in industry, he lived and worked in a small fishing village in Kerala State, India to help small-scale fishers to organize their cooperative. This work spread with the help of those trained from the villages. He then moved to the Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum, India but continued to be an activist-researcher. He organized the first International Conference of Fishworkers and their Supporters in Rome in 1984, parallel to the UN/FAO World Conference on Fisheries. He was a founder member of the International Collective in Support of Fishworkers (www.icsf.net). From 1997 to 2006 he served as Vice-Chairperson of the UN/FAO Advisory Committee on Fisheries Research (ACFR). From 2005 he worked in Cambodia with inland fishing communities and the government to assist their Community Fisheries program. Between 2007 and 2010 he was UN/FAO Fisheries Co-Management Advisor in post-tsunami Aceh Province, Indonesia. He retired as Professor from the Centre for Development Studies and is now Visiting Professor at the Azim Premji University, Bangalore, India, where he offers a course on Coastal Zone Livelihoods and Sustainable Management for MA (Development) students. He continues his involvement with Community Fisheries initiatives in Cambodia and more recently in Myanmar. His interests include natural resources management, issues in common property resource management, collective action and rural organisations and development issues with special reference to aquatic eco-systems and fishing communities. His informal association with World Fish goes back to the late 1970s. His publications can be accessed at www.researchgate.net.
