About Me

Samantha Sherman grew up in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She has always had a passion for the ocean, particularly sharks and rays. Samm completed her undergraduate honours degree in Marine and Freshwater Biology at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario, Canada in 2012. Her honours thesis at the Hagen Aqualab looked at the metabolism of methylamines in the Brownbanded Bamboo Shark (Chiloscyllium punctatum). After moving to Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia to teach SCUBA diving, Samantha returned to academia and began a Masters at James Cook University in Townsville, Queensland, Australia. Her Masters project involved a management effectiveness evaluation on Australian commercial fisheries and their management of shark catch. Throughout her Masters, Samm worked at Billabong Sanctuary as a casual ranger. Samm completed her PhD at JCU in September 2019. Her project looked at the ecology of rays on coral reefs, and she is proudly part of the Global Fin Print project. She added to our limited knowledge of ray diversity, abundance and distribution, particularly in SE Asia and hopes to continue in this field. Samantha is currently a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. She is also affiliated with TRAFFIC looking at the management risk to the most traded shark and ray species globally. She is also the secretary of the Oceania Chondrichthyan Society (OCS). Follow her twitter for updates!