Jerry Wetherall
Voices from the Science Centers
Voices from the Science Centers is an oral history initiative dedicated to documenting the institutional knowledge of fisheries scientists and administrators in the labs of NOAA’s Fisheries Science Centers.
Jerry Wetherall was born in San Francisco. He graduated from Humboldt State University with his undergraduate degree and received his PhD at the University of Washington. His dissertation focused on salmon, downstream migration of salmon, on the Duwamish River. He served in the Peace Corps in Uganda and Kenya,and then began his career with National Marine Fisheries Service in 1974 at the Honolulu lab. Jerry has had a long and distinguished career in NOAA Fisheries and has worked all over the Pacific on a variety of topics.
Interview contains discussions of: Peace Corps, tuna fishery, aku fleet and bait, skipjack, development of international management, high seas drift net fishery, international observer program, swordfish fishery, turtle interactions and lawsuits, lobster stock assessment, Scientific Information System, data visualization, GIFAs, data and databases.
Dr. Wetherall discusses his long career at the Honolulu lab. He provides a rich description of the history of fisheries work in the Pacific as well as the history of the Honolulu lab. He describes the changes which took place and his current work on data management.
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