headshot of Liliana Sierra Castillo

PhD Student

Address
Bren Hall 4328

Education
MS, Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences, Texas A&M University
BS, Biology, National Autonomous University of Honduras

Bio
Liliana graduated from the National University of Honduras (UNAH) in 2015, with a Bachelor of Science in aquatic and marine biology. While pursuing her degree, she did an internship with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) where she worked alongside fishers from a small-scale fishery in Tela, Honduras, to collect fishery-related data and socioeconomic data. After her graduation, she started working with the Coral Reef Alliance (CORAL) as a program manager in Tela. She was manager of this program for almost three years, where she collected and analyzed fishery data, developed the first fishery management plan for Honduras, developed management plans for marine areas, built a governance platform with the different actors involved in the fishery and supported local organizations in the development and implementation of management tools. Her passion for marine resources management, and more specifically small-scale fisheries management was so great that she decided to pursue a Master’s degree in Fisheries Sciences. She earned her Master’s degree from Texas A&M University, in Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences, where she worked in the Quantitative Ecology Lab. Her thesis consisted of utilizing different models to correct for the fishing gear selectivity bias that occurs in fishery-dependent data and estimated important population parameters, using the data collected from a small-scale fishery in Honduras as a case study. At the Bren School she will be working with data from different small-scale fisheries in Latin America and hopes to continue contributing to the knowledge gap in small-scale fisheries assessment and management.

Year Admitted
2019

Faculty Advisors
Steve Gaines and Jono Wilson

Research Areas
Small-scale fisheries, fisheries stock assessment, fish ecology, ecological data analysis