Tomo Eguchi, Ph.D.

Tomo’s graduate education started in marine mammal science, and he received an M.S. from Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, California State University (1998) where he studied the diving behavior, movements, and morphology of harbor seals in the Monterey Bay area. For his Ph.D. at Montana State University (2003), Tomo developed a hierarchical Bayesian statistical model for estimating the abundance of bottlenose dolphins from photographic capture-recapture data. The model was applied to various bottlenose dolphin photo-identification catalogs along the east coast of the US, ranging from New Jersey to Florida. He also received an M.S. in statistics from Montana State University (2003). Before leading the Cetacean Health and Life History Program, Tomo was with the sea turtle program at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center. Tomo has been involved in a wide variety of field projects, including southern California green turtle in-water capture, Baja loggerhead turtle aerial surveys, southern California loggerhead turtle aerial surveys, central California leatherback turtle aerial surveys, central California leatherback turtle in-water capture, St Croix leatherback turtle nesting beach studies, and the Gulf of Mexico oil spill response. Tomo is also a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for the Raine Island Recovery Project (Queensland, Australia), and also he spends a lot of time analyzing a wide variety of data, including capture-mark-recapture, line-transect, time-series, spatial, and hormone data. In general, Tomo is interested in understanding ecology and demography of marine species through rigorous data collection and innovative statistical analyses.