How Do You Excel as a Fisheries Scientist? Reflections on a Career with Senior Scientist Dr. Jason Link

Jason Link has been a scientist with NOAA Fisheries for more than 25 years. In 2025, he was honored with the American Fisheries Society's Award of Excellence, which recognizes outstanding contributions to the aquatic sciences.

How did you get started in fisheries science? What brought you to NOAA?

I was actually going to school in Michigan and playing baseball when I blew out my elbow and realized I was a better biologist than a baseball player. I jumped into limnology, the study of freshwater lakes and rivers. Going into grad school, I was wondering if I should study insects or plankton, and I remember stressing over that something fierce. But I'd always loved to be submerged in aquatic environments, so I chose plankton.

From there, I ended up working in Lake Superior, which is one of the Laurentian Great Lakes as well as an inland sea. I was studying the zooplankton community, and what I was seeing out in the lake was very different from what people had published a couple decades before. I wrote a letter to a guy named Jim Selgoby and said, "Hey, this is different from what I'm seeing. What do you think's going on? Am I missing something?" And he immediately replied and said, "Come on over here to my lab. We've had a huge change in the fish population of lake herring, and we think it's totally changed the whole ecosystem and food web in the lake."

Long story short, I did. I got into working with fish. This was a time when there was a big disciplinary debate over top-down, bottom-up control and trophic cascades in entire systems. And we actually showed that all that was happening at the scale of this large inland sea, Lake Superior, because there had been a recovery of these planktivorous fish. That was pretty fascinating.

When it came time to graduate, I began to look at what was in my toolbox and what my interests were. I loved pelagic ecosystems. I loved big water. I had worked with these small silver fish-lake herring-that ate a lot of plankton and were eaten by just about every main predator. They served as this intermediary link between the upper and lower trophic levels. And there's fish like that in almost every ecosystem, so that was a portable skill that I had, as well as some statistical and modeling skills.

I ended up in the Gulf, working at a NOAA Fisheries lab in Pascagoula. I was overseeing a contract to get their surveys out. I did that for a few years and learned the business of science, how to deal with insurance problems, logistics, leadership, and so forth. And then there was a position that opened up in Woods Hole to run their food web dynamics program, and I figured, why not? I threw my hat in the ring, and I ended up there, and that was almost 30 years ago now.

What does your current role as Senior Scientist entail?

My position opened up around 2012, so I've been in this role for almost 14 years now. In my role, I'm the one in executive committees and senior boards advocating for all kinds of ecosystem approaches and ecosystem-based fisheries management , or EBFM. I'm the one championing a lot of our folks' efforts in ecosystem science . I also encourage people to take the myriad of factors that influence management and zoom out on the key patterns and processes so we don't get lost in the weeds and can still meet our mission.

The short version of all that is I try to make sure we don't miss anything, be it climate-related impacts on fisheries, predation, or economics. I ask questions like: How can we maximize national fisheries landings and fisheries revenue by taking a more comprehensive and coordinated approach? Those are some of the things we've been focused on more recently, like producing portfolio analyses for different fisheries .

What's an accomplishment or career highlight that you're particularly proud of?

I could run down the list of more than 220 publications, and I probably have 15 or 20 of my favorites, and all the books I've written, and all the talks I've given, and all of that. There are two specific things I'd rather focus on, though.

One is that we've got a team of people in NOAA Fisheries who are absolutely excellent. And we have a lot of colleagues with whom I'm very proud to have been associated. I hope I've had a small hand in helping develop people's careers or clearing the way so that it's a little easier for them to do ecosystem-based fisheries management.

I've directly mentored 10 or 15 folks and 50 to 70 indirectly. And I look around now, and there's a lot of them doing ecosystem-based fisheries management. They're leaders in the organization now, they're leaders in the discipline, they're leaders in various universities. I think that is probably one of the biggest things I could point at and say that that is a legacy. That lasts, and that's something I'm proud of.

The other thing I would highlight is not all the programs we've developed or proposals we've written-though that's all important, too. It's the ecosystem-based fisheries management policy statement and road map . We originally developed it in 2016 , and we renewed it in 2024. That policy statement really set a marker down for the agency that we have used as a guiding light on many occasions. That-and the group of people that worked with me to make those things happen-is another big accomplishment. In retrospect, I might not have looked forward to it, but I'm actually pretty proud that we've been able to achieve it.

Reflecting on your many years in this field, what advice would you give early-career fisheries professionals?

I would simply say it's about attitude-an attitude of continually learning, challenging yourself, pushing yourself, pushing those around you, and pushing your organization. By all means, push NOAA Fisheries. We need to always be getting better. Keep an open mind, dig deeper, and don't accept things at face value. Make sure you listen to folks who might have a different background or perspective than you. More than doing any one specific thing, just try to be open to it all.