Dr Douglas Speirs

Personal statement

I joined the faculty staff of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics in 2007 and was appointed senior lecturer in Marine Resource Modelling in 2014.  I am also the departmental Director of Knowledge Exchange, responsible for helping colleagues develop KE activities such as Knowledge Transfer Partnerships, Continuous Professional Development, and consultancy. My research involves developing computationally efficient population models of fish stocks in which physiological structure and spatial structure and combined, and I have strong track record of widely cited peer-reviewed publications (average of 24 citations per article, three papers with >100 citations). My research on spatial modelling of zooplankton, as part of the NERC MarProd programme, established a new to modelling the growth and transport by ocean currents of stage-structured populations (e.g. Speirs et al. 2006, Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser. 313, 173-192). With partners at Marine Scotland Science I led the development of a new size-structured multispecies model for fish communities (Speirs et al. 2010, Fish. Res. 106, 474-494), now known as FishSUMS (Fish – Strathclyde University – Marine Scotland). Motivated by policy-driven concerns about the effects of multi-species fisheries, the model has been used to explore the consequences of a range of fisheries management scenarios. Over the last seven years I have been PI or Co-I in grants totalling over £1.3 million FEC. I am an editor for Ecology and the Journal of Biological Systems, and I sit on steering groups of the Strathclyde Marine Institute and the Centre for Mathematics Applied to the Life Sciences (CMALS).  I am deputy convener of the MASTS Fisheries Forum, a group that has representation from all major fisheries related institutes in Scotland, and covers diverse disciplines including biology, stock assessment, ecosystem modelling, economics, and stakeholder experience.