Andrew DeVogeleare, PhD

ANDREW DEVOGELEARE is currently the Research Director for the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. His position involves providing scientific information about the Sanctuary to decision makers, so they can make good, informed decisions and provide for ocean education. The Research Director is also tasked with understanding what’s happening in the Sanctuary ecosystems and monitoring change through time, particularly the health of the Sanctuary and how’s it changing.

Andrew has a small staff and a small budget, but he acknowledges having the brightest and best marine science collaborators here in Monterey Bay and, for that matter, anywhere else in the world. He says they’re very bright, exciting people to be around, including the grad students, and they know more about this area of the ocean than is known about most places in the world.

Andrew was born in the San Francisco Bay area and grew up in Berkeley. His dad was on the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley), so Andrew got to grow up in the Berkeley Hills and experience all the good there was in that community.

He’s been interested in marine biology since he was a kid, where he first became interested in marine and aquatic science while raising tropical fish, reading books, and watching TV. And as with so many others, Jacques Cousteau also made an impact on Andrew’s young, impressionable mind.

In his youth, Andrew and all his friends had aquaria with fresh water fish. When he started his fish-breeding hobby he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to get into freshwater biology or marine biology, but the great visuals, photos and movies he saw during those early years inspired him to do something with his life he was passionate about. His parents were supportive and had told him to do something he loved.

Because of his love of fish and biology, he decided to study marine biology as an undergrad. Andrew attended UC Berkeley and was excited to declare his major as marine biology at the end of his second year in college, but his advisor said don’t do it you’ll never get a job, because his daughter had a marine biology degree and couldn’t get a job. Andrew decided to take his parents’ advice over his advisor’s and followed through anyway.

After completing his undergraduate work at UC Berkeley, Andrew attended Moss Landing Marine Labs (MLML) on the shores of Monterey Bay, where he got his Master’s Degree studying rocky shore ecology. Andrew then propelled those studies into a PhD at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

While in school, Andrew did some consulting work for Kinnetic Labs in Santa Cruz looking at impacts of oil spills and associated rocky shore recovery rates.  This background led him to a postdoctoral position at MLML, studying the effectiveness of different cleaning techniques after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska. At the same time, he worked as the first Research Coordinator for the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve and served as an elected official as a Moss Landing Harbor Commissioner.

In 1995 Andrew started at the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, where he continues to this day now as its Research Director.