Professor Sheila JJ Heymans

Sheila JJ Heymans is the Executive Director of the European Marine Board and a Fellow of the Royal Society for Biology of the UK. She is a Professor in Ecosystem Modelling at the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) and was the Head of the Science Department (2016-2017) at the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS, a partner organisation of UHI) and Leader of the UHI Cluster on Marine, Environmental Science and Engineering. She was the Head of the Ecology Department (2013-2016), Leader of the “People and the Sea” research theme (2012-2013), part of the 2013 Research Excellence Framework preparation team for SAMS and part of the UHI REF 2020 preparation team (2016-2017). She was part of the “Understanding ecosystems for sustainable resource exploitation in the deep ocean” scoping group for UK NERC, on the scientific advisory groups for the UK ESPA project SPACES. Sheila is Vice-Chair of the EOOS Steering Group, sits on the Ecopath Consortium Board, on the External Expert Identification Committee of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in Canada, and on the Advisory Boards of various EU projects including Blue Cloud 2026, NECCTON, among others. She is currently on the Editorial Board of the UNESCOI/IOC’s third Global Ocean Science Report. She has previously been part of various ICES Working Groups (WKIRISH, WGCOMEDA, etc.) as well as the International Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) where she was a lead author on the chapter: “Policy support tools and methodologies for scenario analysis and modelling of biodiversity and ecosystem services”. She is the editor of EMB Policy documents (see below http://www.marineboard.eu/publications).

Over the past 30 years her research spanned the environmental impacts of fisheries and ecosystem change. She has published > 100 peer-reviewed publications on a variety of topics ranging from the ecosystem effects of fishing, indicators of ecosystem status, the reasons for species decline, historical reconstructions of ecosystems, to the impact of fishing subsidies on the North Sea ecosystem. She has a background in ecosystem modelling approaches such as Ecopath with Ecosim and Ecological Network Analysis and has used and taught both techniques extensively since 1993. Recently her research focus has been the social, economic and ecological impacts of fishing in the world’s ocean and the resilience of these ecosystems to fishing and environmental changes. Her work experience includes historic reconstructions of ecosystems such as the Bird’s Head archipelago of Papua, Indonesia and the fisheries of Sierra Leone for the Sea Around Us Project (University of British Columbia’s Fisheries Centre), the 500 years of Newfoundland fisheries and the ecosystem of northern British Columbia (Coasts under Stress). While at the Fisheries Centre she also studied the decline of Steller sea lions in Alaska and prior to her tenure there she worked on the ecosystem interactions of the gramminoid marshes of the Everglades at the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory of the University of Maryland. While at SAMS she taught a CPD course in Ecopath with Ecosim, co-ordinated two MSc modules, on Professional Skills and Advanced Modelling and she was the programme leader for the MSc in Ecosystem Based Marine Management at SAMS from 2012-2016.