Prof. Dror Angel is an applied marine ecologist at the Department of Maritime Civilizations and the head of the Laboratory of Applied Marine Biology & Ecology Research (AMBER), Charney School of Marine Science and the Recanati Institute for Maritime Research at the University of Haifa, Israel. He obtained his PhD in Biological Oceanography from the City University of New York and spent a decade as a researcher at the National Center for Mariculture in Eilat, Israel, focusing on environmental interactions of aquaculture and on developing sustainable approaches to aquaculture. He has considerable experience in the field and is equally comfortable studying the ecology of the water column and the seafloor, from small boats and ships and by SCUBA diving. At the University of Haifa, he studies a variety of environmental issues that affect and are affected by human activities, and he shares his experience in these areas with policy and decision makers both nationally and internationally. Research he has recently been involved in includes the characterization of microplastic pollution and its environmental and biological implications along the Israeli Mediterranean coast; integrated multi-trophic aquaculture and plankton dynamics in Israeli coastal waters. In addition, he studies the causes for, and ecological and socio-economic consequences of invasive species and jellyfish blooms in a quest to understand how these may be controlled and utilized. He employs citizen science in the study of jellyfish and has taken part in development of a citizen science based website and a smart-phone application for this purpose.

E-mail: adror@research.haifa.ac.il