Responsibilities

• Responsible for conducting the bigeye tuna stock assessment.
• Participation in the SPC-IATTC collaboration for conducting the Pacific wide bigeye tuna stock assessment.
• Participation in the SPC-IATTC collaboration for conducting the South Pacific albacore stock assessment.

Education

• Ph.D., Stony Brook University, USA, 2016
• B.Sc., Peking University, China, 2012

Biography

Dr. Haikun Xu joined the Stock Assessment Program in 2018. He is the stock assessment scientist responsible for conducting the stock assessment of bigeye tuna in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Haikun’s research focuses on a variety of topics including improving stock assessment methods, standardizing fishery-dependent catch-per-unit-effort observations, and understanding the impacts of climate on fish and fisheries. As part of his Ph.D. research at Stony Brook University, Haikun incorporated environmental effects on recruitment of yellowtail flounder into a state-space age-structured stock assessment. For his postdoctoral research, Haikun worked at the University of Washington where he developed a new semi-parametric method for autocorrelated age- and time-varying selectivity which has been implemented in Stock Synthesis, the stock assessment model used at IATTC. He also investigated the best practices for weighting composition data in stock assessments when the new age- and time-varying selectivity options are used. Since Haikun joined the staff, he has adapted a spatiotemporal delta-generalized linear mixed model to analyze the spatiotemporal dynamics of the dolphin-associated purse-seine fishery for yellowfin tuna and, more importantly, to provide an improved index of relative abundance and associated length compositions to the stock assessment model.