Meet the Team
External Affairs Team
Jainey Bavishi, Director
jainey.bavishi@noaa.gov
202-482-6090
Jainey K. Bavishi serves as the Director of External Affairs at NOAA. In this role, she is responsible for overseeing coordination of NOAA’s engagement of stakeholder on priority issues. Jainey previously served as a Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of the Under Secretary at NOAA. Prior to coming to NOAA, Jainey worked most recently as the Director of the Equity and Inclusion Campaign, a regional federal advocacy coalition of nonprofit and community leaders from Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, at the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation. Jainey has also pursued her interests in community development globally in Orissa, India, Cape Town, South Africa, and Havana, Cuba. Jainey has a master’s in city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bachelor's in public policy and cultural anthropology from Duke University.
James Chang, Deputy Director
james.chang@noaa.gov
202-482-6090
James Chang comes to his role as Deputy Director of NOAA External affairs as a seasoned advocate for good government solutions. A Summa Cum Laude graduate of Yale University, and honors graduate of the University of Washington’s School of Law, James entered government service through Hawaii’s Department of the Attorney General, where he enjoyed a case load split between litigation and providing advice and counsel to State agencies. Dividing his time between resolving individual cases and planning strategically to improve government service opened James’ eyes to a broader palate of tools for problem solving—and when U.S. Senator Daniel K. Inouye gave him the chance to use these tools at a national level in his Washington, D.C., office, James eagerly accepted. The following ten years saw James supporting the Senator as a policy advisor in a variety of subject areas. Through it all, the Senator constantly reinforced a lesson James continues to follow today: find solutions that help real people.
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Liam Carr, Senior Advisor to the Director
liam.m.carr@noaa.gov
202-482-6090
Liam Carr is a 2012-2013 Knauss Sea Grant Fellow and a 2012 graduate from Texas A&M University, with a Ph.D. in Geography. His dissertation modeled spatial and temporal dynamics of small-scale commercial fishing behavior in St. Croix, USVI, as a proxy for understanding ecological and economic processes in an otherwise data-poor fishery. Before Texas, Liam worked at the University of the Virgin Islands, monitoring coral health and reef fish communities. He holds a Master of Forest Science from Yale University, where his 2001 thesis work examined the existence value of the Great Barrier Reef for tourism, and is a 1999 graduate of the University of Southern California, with degrees in Biological Sciences and Environmental Studies. He has successfully followed his interests to work in Australia, France, and throughout the Caribbean. He comes to Washington with his loyal island dog, Rowan, and an adventurous spirit to explore a city that he spent a decade trying to avoid.
Dr. Mark Eakin, LCDP Fellow
mark.eakin@noaa.gov
202-482-6090
C. Mark Eakin is in a rotation to External Affairs during the fall of 2012 through NOAA’s Leadership Competencies Development Program. Dr. Eakin has worked for NOAA for over 20 years and currently directs Coral Reef Watch, a program that monitors coral reef ecosystems through satellite and in water observations. A coral reef ecologist by training, Dr. Eakin holds a Ph.D. from the University of Miami and both a Master of Science and Bachelor of Science from Florida Atlantic University. He publishes on coral reef ecology, especially the impact of climate change on coral reefs, coral bleaching, ocean acidification, oil spills, coral paleoclimatology, and the behavior of marine organisms. He co-chairs the US Coral Reef Task Force’s Climate Change Working Group and has testified before the US Congress on the impacts of climate change.
Associates
Colin Quinn, NOAA Office of Policy
colin.quinn@noaa.gov
Colin is a AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow working as a policy advisor for climate and strengthening science-related topics in NOAA’s Office of the Under Secretary. Prior to joining NOAA, Colin worked as a post-doctoral associate at Colorado State University where he focused on plant ecology. His research focused on the ecological implications of using plants to clean up polluted areas, termed phytoremediation. Colin was also a research fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Bocas del Toro, Panama, where he investigated the ecology of tropical ferns. Colin earned his Ph.D. in plant ecology from Colorado State University, where he served as the first president of CSU’s Society for Ecological Restoration. He received an undergraduate degree in biology at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Colin is originally from Austin, Texas and is interested in how science shapes policy and vice versa, and ensuring an honest relationship between the two is upheld.
Michaela Clemence, NOAA Program Coordination Office
michaela.clemence@noaa.gov
Michaela Clemence currently serves as the 2012 PCO Sea Grant Fellow. She received her BS in biology and environmental studies from the University of Richmond and her MS in coastal marine resources management from the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at UCSB. Her graduate work focused on marine spatial planning and bio-economic modeling for offshore shrimp aquaculture in Mexico. Michaela has previously worked with the National Marine Fisheries Service investigating the role of marine protected areas in resource management in the U.S. Virgin Islands and as a corporate recruiter for bio-pharmaceutical companies in Boston.