May 1, 2026 — UMBC has secured $1.5 million in congressional funding to establish the UMBC Center for Precision Aquaculture, an interdisciplinary effort aimed at revolutionizing land-based fish production through real-time monitoring and smart technology.
The new center brings together faculty and students from UMBC’s marine biotechnology, chemistry and biochemistry, and computer science and electrical engineering (CSEE) departments. The interdisciplinary team will strive to make domestic aquaculture more efficient, healthier for fish, and environmentally responsible—while helping reduce America’s massive seafood trade deficit.
“Fish are the last ‘hunt-and-gather’ animal crop,” says Yonathan Zohar, professor and chair of marine biotechnology and the new center’s lead. “To relieve pressure on our oceans, fish—like other animal proteins—must be produced through farming or aquaculture.”
Bringing a “blue revolution”
The U.S. imports over 90 percent of its seafood and nearly all its Atlantic salmon, contributing to American seafood imports exceeding exports by roughly $20 billion, the largest deficit across all agricultural crops. And aquaculture is the fastest-growing sector of global and U.S. agriculture, yet the U.S. ranks only 18th in production.
To address these challenges, Zohar and his team at the Aquaculture Research Center (ARC) at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor have long pioneered recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS)—self-contained, land-based tanks that recycle nearly all their water and discharge nothing into the environment. Compared to the floating, open-ocean pens currently used to farm fish, other perks of land-based operations include preventing commingling of captive fish with wild stocks, limiting disease exposure, the ability to bring fish to market size more quickly and more often throughout the year, and reduced transportation costs and emissions associated with bringing fresh seafood to inland areas. The ARC even converts solid fish waste into biogas that could supply part of the facility’s energy needs.