Dr Anna Sturrock is a UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellow and an Assistant Professor at the University of Essex, UK.
Anna completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Edinburgh, her Masters at the University of Otago in New Zealand as a Leverhulme Trust Study Abroad Fellow, and her PhD at the University of Southampton and the Centre for the Environmental Fisheries and Aquaculture Science via a Fisheries Society of the British Isles Studentship. From 2012 to 2020 she was a postdoc and then senior researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz, Berkeley and then Davis, leading a number of projects with NOAA, the US Fish and Wildlife Service and CA Department of Fish and Wildlife.
She primarily uses an integrative, interdisciplinary approach (natural & applied tags, field and lab studies, modelling) to understand fish provenance, migration behavior, trophic ecology, and physiology. Her work often involves generating or synthesizing empirical data to inform management, focusing on processes driving ecosystem function and sustainable delivery of ecosystem services in a changing climate. For more than a decade her research has used (and developed methods to use) archival tissues to reconstruct age, growth, habitat use and environmental histories of fishes.
While working in California her work focused on Chinook salmon life history diversity and survival under varying climatic conditions, reconstructing juvenile rearing strategies and their relative success across years and populations. While she still works a great deal with salmonids, she is moving up the salinity gradient and currently working with a range of species, including European seabass, yellowfin tuna, cuttlefish, anchovies and plaice. She is a co-leader of SEA-UNICORN Working Group 1 and can be found on the Twittersphere as well.
