Dr. Sue Lowerre-Barbieri is a research professor of Fisheries and Aquatic Science in the School of Forest, Fisheries, and Geomatics Sciences (SFFGS) at the University of Florida. She is a fisheries ecologist, whose research focuses on improving our understanding of marine fish productivity through integration of species-specific spatial ecology and reproductive strategies. She takes a collaborative, integrative approach to do so, using models and multiple data sources, including acoustic telemetry, passive acoustics, histology and genetics.

She leads the Movement Ecology and Reproductive Resilience (MERR) laboratory, which is a science collaborative between UF SFFGS and the Florida Wildlife Conservation Commission’s  Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute.  MERR integrates academic and government expertise, providing graduate student opportunities to draw on both, while working on research projects that show how emerging understanding of fisheries ecology can inform fisheries management. Sue collaborates internationally with scientists from Brazil, Spain and France and has led multiple international symposia or been an invited speaker, panelist or graduate student committee member. She is founder and director of the Gulf of Mexico telemetry network, iTAG (Integrative Tracking of Aquatic Animals in the Gulf of Mexico), working closely with GCOOS and the Ocean Tracking Network. iTAG currently has more than 200 members, from three countries, matching hundreds of thousands of detections to iTAG members’ animals each year from sea turtles to white sharks.