January 14, 2026 — Jason Link has been a scientist with NOAA Fisheries for more than 25 years. In 2025, he was honored with the American Fisheries Society’s Award of Excellence, which recognizes outstanding contributions to the aquatic sciences.
How did you get started in fisheries science? What brought you to NOAA?
I was actually going to school in Michigan and playing baseball when I blew out my elbow and realized I was a better biologist than a baseball player. I jumped into limnology, the study of freshwater lakes and rivers. Going into grad school, I was wondering if I should study insects or plankton, and I remember stressing over that something fierce. But I’d always loved to be submerged in aquatic environments, so I chose plankton.
From there, I ended up working in Lake Superior, which is one of the Laurentian Great Lakes as well as an inland sea. I was studying the zooplankton community, and what I was seeing out in the lake was very different from what people had published a couple decades before. I wrote a letter to a guy named Jim Selgeby and said, “Hey, this is different from what I’m seeing. What do you think’s going on? Am I missing something?” And he immediately replied and said, “Come on over here to my lab. We’ve had a huge change in the fish population of lake herring, and we think it’s totally changed the whole ecosystem and food web in the lake.”
Long story short, I did. I got into working with fish. This was a time when there was a big disciplinary debate over top-down, bottom-up control and trophic cascades in entire systems. And we actually showed that all that was happening at the scale of this large inland sea, Lake Superior, because there had been a recovery of these planktivorous fish. That was pretty fascinating.
When it came time to graduate, I began to look at what was in my toolbox and what my interests were. I loved pelagic ecosystems. I loved big water. I had worked with these small silver fish—lake herring—that ate a lot of plankton and were eaten by just about every main predator. They served as this intermediary link between the upper and lower trophic levels. And there’s fish like that in almost every ecosystem, so that was a portable skill that I had, as well as some statistical and modeling skills.
I ended up in the Gulf, working at a NOAA Fisheries lab in Pascagoula. I was overseeing a contract to get their surveys out. I did that for a few years and learned the business of science, how to deal with insurance problems, logistics, leadership, and so forth. And then there was a position that opened up in Woods Hole to run their food web dynamics program, and I figured, why not? I threw my hat in the ring, and I ended up there, and that was almost 30 years ago now.
ason Link has been a scientist with NOAA Fisheries for more than 25 years. In 2025, he was honored with the American Fisheries Society’s Award of Excellence, which recognizes outstanding contributions to the aquatic sciences.
How did you get started in fisheries science? What brought you to NOAA?
I was actually going to school in Michigan and playing baseball when I blew out my elbow and realized I was a better biologist than a baseball player. I jumped into limnology, the study of freshwater lakes and rivers. Going into grad school, I was wondering if I should study insects or plankton, and I remember stressing over that something fierce. But I’d always loved to be submerged in aquatic environments, so I chose plankton.
From there, I ended up working in Lake Superior, which is one of the Laurentian Great Lakes as well as an inland sea. I was studying the zooplankton community, and what I was seeing out in the lake was very different from what people had published a couple decades before. I wrote a letter to a guy named Jim Selgeby and said, “Hey, this is different from what I’m seeing. What do you think’s going on? Am I missing something?” And he immediately replied and said, “Come on over here to my lab. We’ve had a huge change in the fish population of lake herring, and we think it’s totally changed the whole ecosystem and food web in the lake.”
Long story short, I did. I got into working with fish. This was a time when there was a big disciplinary debate over top-down, bottom-up control and trophic cascades in entire systems. And we actually showed that all that was happening at the scale of this large inland sea, Lake Superior, because there had been a recovery of these planktivorous fish. That was pretty fascinating.
When it came time to graduate, I began to look at what was in my toolbox and what my interests were. I loved pelagic ecosystems. I loved big water. I had worked with these small silver fish—lake herring—that ate a lot of plankton and were eaten by just about every main predator. They served as this intermediary link between the upper and lower trophic levels. And there’s fish like that in almost every ecosystem, so that was a portable skill that I had, as well as some statistical and modeling skills.
I ended up in the Gulf, working at a NOAA Fisheries lab in Pascagoula. I was overseeing a contract to get their surveys out. I did that for a few years and learned the business of science, how to deal with insurance problems, logistics, leadership, and so forth. And then there was a position that opened up in Woods Hole to run their food web dynamics program, and I figured, why not? I threw my hat in the ring, and I ended up there, and that was almost 30 years ago now.