- Sarah Fangman
Sarah Fangman was born and raised in Minneapolis Minnesota. Her love of the oceans was initially fostered by a trip to the Caribbean with her family one winter and it could be argued that her life has not been quite the same since.
After graduating High School at Breck she intended to pursue a degree in Psychology at Middlebury College, that is, until she chose to indulge an academic curiosity in environmental studies. Doing so enabled her to foster a desire to better understand the ocean realm; after a junior trip to the Virgin Islands her future was virtually paved by her incessant inquisitiveness to understand and explore the vast uniqueness of the marine world.
Sarah spent several years conducting fieldwork in the Turks and Caicos Islands and off the coast of North Carolina with the School for Field Studies before traveling to Seattle Washington for graduate studies at the University of Washington's School of Marine Affairs. While still in graduate school, Sarah began working for NOAA's Northwest Fisheries Science Center investigating the impact of pinniped (seals and sea lions) predation on salmon populations. After graduating from the University of Washington, she was awarded a Presidential Management Fellowship in Washington DC and subsequently transferred to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary, where she would spend the next eight years as the Research Coordinator.
In her tenure at Channel Islands, Sarah would: become a NOAA Divemaster and DMT; obtain a US Coast Guard Captain�s license; pilot a single-person manned submersible; dive to 9,500 feet in the Alvin submersible, participate in several manned excursions aboard the Delta submersible, not to mention making her first saturation in Aquarius (this will be her second saturation mission). While at the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary, she participated in over forty research cruises and served as Chief Scientist on more than a dozen of them. Some of Sarah�s research projects included: population studies of Xantus's murrelets; SCUBA surveys of the kelp forest; and habitat characterization surveys using Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs).
Sarah currently serves the Southeast/Gulf of Mexico region of the National Marine Sanctuaries Program and is based out of the offices of Gray’s Reef National Marine Sanctuary. If you have any questions for Sarah, you can inquire directly to Sarah.Fangman@NOAA.gov.
Being a part of this saturation mission is incredibly exciting; living underwater to a marine scientist is what going into outer space is to an astronomer. Observing the ocean from within can only help to advance our knowledge of such a complex, unexplored system.
