“I was always obsessed with sharks,” says Sagarese, who would find skate and dogfish (mud shark) carcasses as a kid and take them home for science experiments. “My mom loved keeping them in the freezer!

The NOAA Fisheries/Sea Grant Fellowship Program selected 12 new fellows in 2014 from 8 universities around the country.  This is the largest combined class of fellows selected since the fellowship program began in 1999 and includes fellows for the first time from University of California Santa Barbara and Princeton.