Dr. Stephen Eayrs is the LTA for Component III of the REBYC-III CLME+ Project.
Dr. Eayrs is an ex-commercial fisher and fishing technologist with over 40 years’ involvement in the commercial fishing industry. He is currently an Extension Officer for the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation (FRDC) in Australia and Director of his own consulting company, Smart Fishing Consulting.
He began his fishing career in the early 1980s fishing for prawns in northern Australia and overseas, and for orange roughy in Tasmania. Between periods on the water he completed an undergraduate degree in fishing technology at the Australian Maritime College (AMC). Later, he returned to the AMC as a fishing technologist and was closely involved in the early development of turtle excluder devices (TEDs) and bycatch reduction devices (BRDs) in prawn trawl fisheries in Australia, the Middle East, Africa, and South East Asia. He also completed a Master of Philosophy degree in fisheries, studying the vertical distribution and behaviour of fish and prawns during capture in an approaching prawn trawl.
In 2017, Dr. Eayrs returned from an 11-year period as a Research Scientist at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland, Maine working closely with fishers and researchers to improve fishing gear performance.
He also completed his doctoral degree at the University of New Hampshire, studying human behaviour and the application of change management principles in the commercial fishing industry.
As an Extension Officer for the FRDC, Dr. Eayrs is responsible for communicating the outcomes of FRDC research investments to fishers and other stakeholders, bringing stakeholders together to solve problems, and contributing to FRDC’s research priority- setting process. Steve is also a technical partner with Terra Moana, and recently completed a survey of trawl fishers with Moana New Zealand documenting their efforts to reduce seabed contact.