Meet the Scientists: Z

Phillip Zavadil Aleut Native Community of St. Paul Island email

Phillip A. Zavadil was born and raised in Southern California and now lives on St. Paul Island, Pribilof Islands, Alaska. Phil, as most people know him, graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz with a Bachelor’s Degree in Environmental Studies and Economics.

He has continued his education in an informal institutional setting within the community of St. Paul Island where he has learned more about the land, sea, sky, life, and culture in this island and surrounding system through observation and active participation in a traditional way of life

For the past 10 years Phil has been a co-director for the Ecosystem Conservation Office (ECO) for the Tribal Government of the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island, a federally recognized Alaskan native tribe. As an ECO Co-Director, Phil -- along with his wife, Aquilina D. Lestenkof -- administers environmental and natural resource programs and projects ranging from waste management to wildlife research and subsistence harvest monitoring.

Phil’s interest in the Bering Sea developed over time on St. Paul Island, as he grew to appreciate and respect the beauty and complexity of the Bering Sea ecosystem, particularly the northern fur seal. St. Paul Island is home and breeding grounds to over 500,000 fur seals, so it is not a coincidence that most of Phil's work involves studying, protecting, and conserving the fur seal for future generations to be able to appreciate and use as a subsistence resource.

Alex Zerbini NOAA-National Marine Mammal Laboratory email

Alex Zerbini is a post-doctoral fellow working for the Cetacean Assessment and Ecology Program at the National Marine Mammal Laboratory, Alaska Fisheries Science Center. Alex’s primary research interests are population ecology, assessment, conservation, and management of large whales. His research focuses on the ecological and management implications of the recovery of large baleen whales species, with emphasis on humpback, fin, and North Pacific right whales. His goal is to understand how physical and biological processes influence the distribution and abundance of whales on multiple geographic scales.

Jinlun Zhang University of Washington email

Dr. Zhang is interested in understanding how air-ice-ocean interaction in polar oceans affects polar and global climate. He investigates properties of polar ice-ocean systems using large-scale sea ice and ocean models. His recent work has focused on the evolution of the Arctic sea ice cover and the upper ocean in response to significant climate change recently observed in the northern polar ocean.

He has developed a coupled global ice-ocean model to study the responses of sea ice to different conditions of surface heat fluxes and the effects of sea ice growth/decay on oceanic thermohaline circulation. He is also interested in developing next-generation sea ice models which capture anisotropic nature of ice dynamics. He has developed efficient sea ice dynamics models that are particularly useful for stable, high-resolution modeling.

His research results have been published in Journal of Physical Oceanography, Journal of Geophysical Research, Journal of Climate, Monthly Weather Review, Geophysical Research Letters, Ocean Modeling, and other scientific journals.