Tracey Sutton, PhD - Consortium Director

Dr. Tracey Sutton is a Professor at the Guy Harvey Oceanographic Center of Nova Southeastern University, located in Dania Beach, Florida. He is currently the Director and Lead Investigator of DEEPEND (www.deependconsortium.org), a 120+-member research consortium formed in 2015 that has published over 100 scientific papers and graduated over 60 students with advanced degrees. Prior to that, Sutton led the Pelagic Nekton working group of the Census of Marine Life program MAR-ECO. He is an invited Expert Panelist on the United Nations First and Second World Ocean Assessments, an Advisory Board member of the Deep Ocean Stewardship Initiative, and a society-elected member of the Board of Governors of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists. He is a recent (2019) recipient of the NSU Provost’s Research and Scholarship Award, given annually to a single faculty member across all NSU Colleges. He earned a Ph.D. at the College of Marine Sciences, University of South Florida, and was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, MA.

Sutton is a biological oceanographer who conducts research on oceanic ecosystem structure, marine food webs, benthic-pelagic coupling, ichthyology, taxonomy, systematics, and biogeography. He is a seagoing scientist (90 cruises) who has conducted research in a wide range of ecosystems, including the North Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, Sargasso Sea, South Atlantic, Gulf of Alaska, and Southern Ocean. His research combines empirical data, numerical modeling, and theoretical ecology to understand Earth’s largest ecosystem, the deep-pelagic ocean. He has published over 130 papers to date, including discoveries of new species of fishes and a recent synthesis of the effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on the open-ocean biota of the Gulf of Mexico.