Authors
Val Kells is an award-winning Marine Science Illustrator who works with designers, curators, biologists, and master planners to create illustrations for educational graphic displays. Her work has appeared in over 30 public aquariums, museums, and nature centers. Val also works with publishers and authors to create a wide variety of books and periodicals. She most recently co-authored and illustrated A Field Guide to Coastal Fishes: From Maine to Texas and A Field Guide to Coastal Fishes: From Alaska to California and she is currently working on the third in that series: A Field Guide to Coastal Fishes of Bermuda, Bahamas, and the Caribbean Sea. Val also illustrated Field Guide to Fishes of the Chesapeake Bay and Tunas and Billfishes of the World, all published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Val lives on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. She is an avid fisherman and naturalist and in her off time, she loves to fish, seine, and explore the coasts.
Kent Carpenter is a well -known ichthyologist and Professor in Biological Sciences at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. He completed his graduate studies at the University of Hawaii, Manoa and studied fishes overseas for over 20 years in the Philippines, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Italy. He is the author of numerous scientific articles on fishes and wrote and edited fish identification guides for the Food and Agriculture Organization including The Living Marine Resources of the Western Central Atlantic. his current work concentrates on evolution of fishes and marine conservation, and currently he is the Director of the Global Marine Species Assessment for the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and Conservation International. Kent is an enthusiastic SCUBA diver and lives with his family in Virginia Beach, VA.
Luiz A. Rocha is the Follett Chair of Ichthyology at the California Academy of Sciences. His major research interests include evolution, conservation, taxonomy, and community ecology of marine fishes. He frequently tries to combine these fields, linking ecology to evolution and using molecular tools to answer biogeographic and taxonomic questions. He has spent more than 6,000 hours underwater collecting and observing fishes, and published more than 150 peer-reviewed articles. In addition, his work has been featured in many popular media outlets, including the New York Times, Scientific American, and National Geographic magazine, and supported conservation efforts across the globe. Luiz lives with his family in Marin County, California, and spends his weekends hiking and mountain biking with his children and their very active dog.
Larry G. Allen is an ichthyologist who is Professor of Biology at California State University, Northridge. He has mentored over 40 successful Master’s degree students, published more than 65 scientific papers, and taught a wide variety of courses, including Pelagic Organisms, Ichthyology, and Ecology of Marine Fishes. His research efforts since the 1970s have included biogeography and ecology of bay/estuarine and coastal marine fishes off California. Dr. Allen was the senior editor of the book Ecology of Marine Fishes: California and Adjacent Waters, published in in 2006. In recent years, Dr. Allen has focused his research on the biology of important recreational and commercial species of the northeastern Pacific Ocean. He is currently serving as president of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists. Larry lives in the Santa Monica Mountains near Los Angeles, California. He is a life-long angler and spends a lot of time catching and studying fishes.
Carole C. Baldwin is Curator of Fishes and Chair of the Department of Vertebrate Zoology at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. Her current research is focused on diversity and eco-evolution of Caribbean reef fishes through integrative genetic and morphological investigation. This work has recently involved submersible diving to 1,000 feet depth in the Caribbean as part of the Deep Reef Observation Project (DROP), an initiative that Carole established in 2011 to explore and monitor long-term changes in poorly studied tropical deep-reef ecosystems. DROP sub diving has resulted in the discovery of over 7 new genera and 60 new species of fishes and invertebrates and the identification of a previously unrecognized deep-reef zone below the mesophotic. Carole co-authored One Fish, Two Fish, Crawfish, Bluefish -- The Smithsonian Sustainable Seafood Cookbook, was a lead curator of the Smithsonian’s Sant Ocean Hall, and was featured in the IMAX film Galapagos 3D.
