Jamie Behan

Jamie first joined GMRI as a Quantitative Research Associate in Lisa Kerr's Quantitative Fisheries Research Lab in September 2021.

As a research associate, Jamie focuses on modeling fish population dynamics and performing statistical analyses to help provide insight into how ecosystem changes will affect species populations and management.

Jamie earned her undergraduate degree in 2019 from the University of Maine, where she majored in Ecology and Environmental Science and minored in Sustainable Agriculture. She followed that with her Master of Science in in Marine Biology in 2021, also at the University of Maine, where she studied in Dr. Yong Chen’s Quantitative Fisheries Ecology Lab.

During graduate school, her thesis work focused on using habitat and population distributional models to explore the scale-dependent and nonstationary environmental effects of American lobster spatial distribution and habitat suitability in the Gulf of Maine, and its management implications. Based on the developed models, she then investigated many “what if” scenarios to address possible impacts of ignoring spatial heterogeneity of lobster-environment relationships. From this work, she has gained extensive statistical analysis and modeling experience.