BIOSKETCH

Dr. Iwanowicz was introduced to fish health while volunteering at a recirculating aquaculture facility in Turners Fall, MA while working on his undergraduate degree at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He completed his BS in 1997. He enrolled in a degree program at the University of Arkansas Pine Bluff to study aquaculture in with an emphasis on fish diseases in 1998. It was here that he developed a passion for virus discovery. After graduating with a MS in 2000 he worked as a contract employee at the USGS, National Fish Health Research Laboratory (USGS-NFHRL) in Leetown, WV.  Soon thereafter he enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He finished his PhD dissertation regarding the application of fish health metrics as indicators of environmental health in 2008 and was hired as a principle investigator at the USGS-NFHRL (now the Eastern Ecological Science Center) later that year. In this role, he continued to focus on the application of resident fishes as sentinels of aquatic ecosystem health, the development of molecular tools for field study, and the identification of emerging diseases of fishes. He established and managed a Core Technology Team to support programmatic needs relevant to environmental water sampling water samples for biological activity including endocrine disrupting activity and toxicity. In 2023 he joined the USDA-ARS National Center for Cool and Cold Water Aquaculture as a research molecular biologist.