Our Team

Dr. Merry Camhi

Dr. Merry Camhi is the Director of WCS’s New York Seascape, a joint program of the New York Aquarium and the Global Marine Program. Launched in July 2010 as the first WCS seascape in North America, this initiative seeks to raise public awareness and take action to conserve threatened marine wildlife in the New York Bight, through conservation research, citizen science and education, and advocacy to improve management policies. Current New York Seascape projects include acoustic and satellite tagging of sharks to better understand their movements and habitat needs in the Mid Atlantic and development of a management plan for American eel and alewife in the Bronx River.

Merry has worked in marine conservation since receiving her Ph.D. in Ecology from Rutgers University, where she studied sea turtles in Costa Rica and Georgia. She then worked for ten years as a scientist and then assistant director of Audubon’s Living Oceans Program. Her efforts have focused on domestic and international conservation and management of large ocean fishes, and sharks in particular.

She has been a member of the IUCN Shark Specialist Group since 1994, and previously served as Deputy Chair and co-editor of Shark News. In 2007, she was the Content Coordinator for the American Museum of Natural History’s exhibition Water: H20 = Life. Her most recent publications are a co-authored IUCN report The Conservation Status of Pelagic Sharks and Rays (2009), and the co-edited book Sharks of the Open Ocean (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008).