David Demer, Ph.D.

David Demer serves as NOAA Senior Scientist for Surveys and Data Acquisitions, guiding the integrated use of technologies in fisheries science and ecosystem-based management. During his 33-year career with NOAA Fisheries, he has collaboratively researched zooplankton and fish stocks, predator-prey interactions, and ecosystems around the world. He has led team efforts in the multidisciplinary development and application of technologies that have helped make NOAA Fisheries an international leader in ecosystem surveys and science.

In the 1990s, he led expeditions to the Southern Ocean, developed echosounder surveys of Antarctic krill, and utilized instrumented small-craft and spar buoys to extend krill observations nearshore. He characterized krill echoes to define protocols for an international survey of the Scotia Sea, and quantified the accuracy and precision of biomass estimates. In 2000, he created the Advanced Survey Technologies Program to join the expertise of engineers, biologists and statisticians. With an interdisciplinary approach, his team and collaborators invented acoustic methods to measure: echoes from individual zooplankton and fish; three-dimensional velocities of animal aggregations; behavior, growth, and abundance of animals in a tank; and seabed depth, slope, hardness and roughness, as well as the unsampled height above the seabed. His team conceived novel techniques for mapping gas seeps and seabed; pioneered shallow-water, multi-frequency and multibeam echosounder surveys of fish, their prey and riverine habitat; developed acoustic-optical surveys for rockfishes and their seabed habitat; and co-developed NOAA Fisheries’ first autonomous underwater vehicle. His team re-introduced and expanded acoustic-trawl surveys of coastal pelagic fishes; partnered with industry to extend the surveys nearshore; added echosounder sampling from uncrewed sailboats, buoys, and seabed landers; and collaborated on combined surveys of hake and small pelagic fishes. For his respective roles, Dr. Demer was awarded a Department of Commerce Bronze Medal in 2008 for implementing the first coastwide acoustic-trawl survey of sardine; a Gold Medal to Southwest Fisheries Science Center in 2014 for co-leading the first joint sardine-hake survey, and a Silver Medal in 2022 for leading the first sardine survey to span the waters off Mexico, the US, and Canada.

Dr. Demer holds a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Arizona and a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Applied Ocean Science, from UC San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He worked for Intel Corporation before joining NOAA Fisheries, and is also a Research Associate at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.