Dr. Barry A. Costa-Pierce
Director, Rhode Island Sea Grant College Program, Graduate School of Oceanography, URI 
Associate Director, Coastal Institute, URI
Joint Professor of Fisheries, Animal & Veterinary Science & Professor of Ocanography
Ph.D. Oceanography, University of Hawaii, 1984; M.S., Zoology, University of Vermont, 1980; B.A., Zoology, Drew University, 1976

Barry Costa-Pierce has held a wide range of scientist and science administrative positions in the U.S. and internationally. For 10 years he was a research scientist for the International Center for Living Aquatic Resources Management (ICLARM), based at the Institute of Ecology in Indonesia. He later directed ICLARM’s Africa office in Zomba, Malawi, where he was also an honorary lecturer in aquatic biology at the University of Malawi. In the U.S. Costa-Pierce has been an Associate Professor at Bemidji State University in Minnesota, a Visiting Scholar at California State Polytechnic University Pomona, lecturer in the Graduate Program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, and a "Student Recommended Faculty in Global Sustainability" at the University of California, Irvine, where he was recognized for making an "exceptional impact on undergraduate education." Before coming to URI he was the director of the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium, a two-state, nine university-member Sea Grant Consortium. Costa-Pierce is active in research and teaching in aquaculture and ecology, with over 100 publications including 15 edited books and monographs with funding from a wide variety of donors such as the World Bank, FAO, USAID, and the Packard Foundation. He authored Ecological Aquaculture: The Evolution of the Blue Revolution (Blackwell Science) and with Alan Desbonnet, Science for Ecosystem-Based Management: Narragansett Bay in the 21st Century (Springer Science). For the past 10 years he has been an international editor of Aquaculture, the top science journal in the field, where he makes decisions on ~300 aquaculture science papers each year from throughout the world. As professor, his Ph.D. students currently work on life cycle assessments and environmental and social carrying capacity issues in aquaculture in R.I. and globally. Costa-Pierce is a Fellow of the American Institute of Fishery Research Biologists, a Senior Fellow at The World Fish Center in Penang, Malaysia, and a member of the Board of Directors of The World Aquaculture Society. Costa-Pierce is of Portuguese decent from the island of Pico. He is married with two teenagers and lives on a small farm in Wakefield, R.I.