Ray Hilborn

Marine biologist and fisheries scientist, known for his work on conservation and natural resource management in the context of fisheries. He is currently professor of aquatic and fishery science at the University of Washington. He focuses on conservation, natural resource management, fisheries stock assessment and risk analysis, and advises several international fisheries commissions and agencies.
Ray Hilborn has authored more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers, and several books.
With Carl Walters, he jointly received the Wildlife Society award for best paper in fish ecology and management.

In 2006, he shared the Volvo Environment Prize with Daniel Pauly and Carl Walters. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

In 2011, he received the Ecological Society of America’s Sustainability Science Award for a 2009 paper with Boris Worm and others entitled Rebuilding global fisheries, Science.

In 2016 he received the International Fisheries Science Prize at the World Fisheries Congress in Busan, South Korea. The award recognized his 40-year career of “highly diversified research and publication in support of global fisheries science and conservation,” according to a news release.

His major areas of current and past research interest include “Bayesian analysis of decision making in natural resources, adaptive management of renewable resources, the dynamics of the Serengeti ecosystem in east Africa, the role of hatcheries in management of Pacific salmon, the ability of institutions to learn from experience, statistical methods in testing dynamic ecological hypotheses, the analysis of migration and dispersal from mark–recapture data, and the ecological dynamics of fishing fleets.