MCBI's Staff

Elliott A. Norse, President (Redmond WA), has primary responsibility for programs, fundraising, and management of MCBI. After finishing his Ph.D. in Marine Ecology at the University of Southern California (1975) and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Iowa (1978), he spent 12 years in Washington, DC, with the US Environmental Protection Agency,  President's Council on Environmental Quality, Ecological Society of America, and The Wilderness Society. In 1990, as Chief Scientist of the Center for Marine Conservation, he moved to Redmond, where he founded MCBI in 1996. While working for President Carter, he wrote the CEQ 1980 Annual Report chapter that first defined the concept of biological diversity. His 100+ publications include three books: Conserving Biological Diversity in Our National Forests (1986), Ancient Forests of the Pacific Northwest (1990), and Global Marine Biological Diversity: A Strategy for Building Conservation into Decision Making (1993). He earned the Evergreen Award for service to the State of Washington and is a Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation.

 Amy Mathews-Amos, Program Director, heads MCBI's public policy efforts and directs our office in Washington DC. After receiving her B.S. from the Department of Natural Resources at Cornell University in 1985, she worked as Program Assistant to Elliott Norse in the Ecological Society of America's Washington DC Office. She left to complete her M.S. in Applied Ecology and M.P.A. in Public Policy at Indiana University. Before joining MCBI in 1997, she served as Evaluator for the US Congress General Accounting Office and as Policy Analyst for Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, where she lobbied Congress on coastal wetlands destruction and worked on the Gulf of Mexico's "dead zone". She has published in Gulf of Mexico Science Journal, Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, Environmental Management, Calypso Log, Global Biodiversity and Conservation Biology.

Beth C. Kantrowitz, Program Associate (Washington DC), received an undergraduate degree in biology in 1989 from Cornell University. She then joined the first cohort of students in the first generation of conservation biology graduate programs, earning an M.S. in Sustainable Development and Conservation Biology from the University of Maryland in 1992. She interned with Defenders of Wildlife and worked as a Program Analyst for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration before earning a second Masters degree in environmental policy from the University of Maryland in 1998. She worked as a research fellow at Center for a Sustainable Economy before joining MCBI in 1999, where she works with Congress, federal agencies and conservation NGOs to implement our policy initiatives.

 Lance Morgan, Postdoctoral Fellow (Redmond WA), is a marine conservation biologist who received his B.A. in Biology in 1985 from University of California-Santa Cruz, M.A. in Marine Science from San Francisco State University in 1991 and Ph.D. in Ecology from University of California-Davis in 1997. His Ph.D. focused on the population dynamics of the red sea urchin and its fishery in northern California. He held a postdoctoral research position at Bodega Marine Laboratory and then served as a National Research Council Postdoctoral Associate at the National Marine Fisheries Service laboratory in Tiburon, CA before joining MCBI in 2000. Lance's research experience with marine mammals, fishes and invertebrates gives him exceptional scientific breadth. In recent years his research in fisheries ecology has focused on marine protected area network design. He has field experience from many sites along the Pacific coast of North America. In addition he has extensive SCUBA experience, and undertook missions as an Aquanaut at the Aquarius Habitat in Key Largo, Florida. He has published papers in Marine Ecology Progress Series, Journal of Wildlife Disease, California Fish and Game, Journal of Mammalogy, Fisheries Oceanography, California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations Reports, and Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences.

Noreen Parks ,Communications Coordinator, (Redmond WA), comes to MCBI with bachelor’s degrees in biology and social sciences, a master’s degree in history, a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California-Santa Cruz. (UCSC), and a golden retriever named Paki. She has worked as a science writer and editor for eleven years, and gained considerable experience in public information and media relations at UCSC and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. A long-time resident of California, she spent six years in Hawaii, where she was project coordinator and an editor of the award-winning Atlas of Hawaii (1999). Topics she has written on include deep-sea landslides, endangered species, long-lived corals and climate change. She has traveled extensively in North America, Europe, Asia, Central and South America and the Pacific. She is an avid hiker, amateur naturalist, scuba diver, and sea kayaker.

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