BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Dr. Daniel Palacios is an oceanographer with a primary interest in understanding the environmental factors that influence the ecology of marine megafauna in pelagic ecosystems. Dr. Palacios' long-standing interest in marine megafauna dates back to his work on Caribbean seabirds and Amazon River dolphins while a Marine Biology student at the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Bogota, Colombia, where he earned his BSc in 1994. He then spent several field seasons conducting cetacean surveys around the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador, with the Ocean Alliance, which formed the basis for his 2003 PhD in Oceanography from Oregon State University. In 2003 Dr. Palacios joined NOAA's Pacific Fisheries Environmental Laboratory (PFEL) as a National Research Council postdoctoral associate to investigate interannual-to-decadal climate variability in water-column structure in the California Current and its impacts on ecosystem productivity. As a member of the Tagging of Pacific Pelagics (TOPP) program since 2004 Dr. Palacios has participated in collaborative, multi-disciplinary projects investigating the movements and habitat associations of blue and humpback whales, elephant seals, Hawaiian albatrosses, leatherback and loggerhead sea turtles, and white sharks using electronic tags and remote sensing.

Since 2009 Dr. Palacios has been contributing to a series of workshops devoted to assessing the impacts of climate change on cetaceans for the International Whaling Commission, Conservation International and the Convention on Migratory Species. Since 2011 he is also a member of the Cetacean Specialist Group of the IUCN-Species Survival Commission. He remains actively involved in promoting research and science advancement in Latin America and is the current Editor-in-Chief of the Latin American Journal of Aquatic Mammals (LAJAM).