Biography

Yajie Liu is currently a PhD student with the Department of Resource Management and Environmental Studies & Fisheries Centre of UBC. Under Dr. Sumaila's supervision, she is looking at how internal and external factors affect the profitability of aquaculture operation for aquaculture firms (or society as a whole). She will use salmon aquaculture as case study with an emphasis ondisease problems. She will develop and apply bioeconomic models to estimate the costs of disease from salmon farms to aquaculture firms and wild salmon fisheries, and then further examine the profitability changes of salmon aquaculture operation. Beside her thesis research, she is also working on a couple of other projects: one is to examine the potential economic impacts of sablefish aquaculture, and the other is to estimate economic values for pinto abalone selective breeding index.

Yajie is originally from Northeast of China. She received her B.Sc from the Shanghai Fisheries University in 1990, major in aquaculture. Upon her completion, she joined the Marine Fisheries Research Institute of Liaoning (MFRIL), China. Her research in the MFRIL focused on: 1) crustacean disease problems; 2) comparison of nutrient digestibility and absorption between farmed and wild shrimp and developing new feed formulas for farmed crustaceans, and 3) red tide monitoring and its environmental and economic impacts on the coastal resources and marine communities in the Bohai Sea. In the meantime, she also worked with fish farms as an aquaculturist, and fish feed manufactory and seafood company as a consultant.

After eight years working in aquaculture research and industry, she came back to school and earned her M.Sc with a major in International Fisheries Management in the Norwegian College of Fishery Science, University of Tromsø, Norway in 2000. Her thesis was to examine the feasibility of transferring Norwegian aquaculture techniques on flatfish to China. During her study, shealso worked in a fish farm in Tromsø as a volunteer. After a shortbreak, she joined the Sea Around Us Project at Fisheries Centre of UBC asa research assistant, working with Drs. Daniel Pauly and Rashid Sumaila on estimating the trophic level of farmed species, evaluating small VS large-scale fisheries in North Atlantic and assisting to develop a global price database.