Since earning his bachelor’s degree in 2019, Mr. Wong has been immersed in the world of fisheries, starting with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC). In this initial position, he aided in an occupancy study of blackbanded sunfish and contributed to an ongoing, long-term population monitoring project of freshwater game species, including largemouth bass and black crappie. Throughout the various positions he held with the FWC, Mr. Wong gained extensive field experience in species and sex identification, electrofishing, otolith aging, marine seining, creel surveying, wet lab tissue sampling, and trawling. During his master’s thesis research at Virginia Tech, he developed novel two-stage regression models and spatiotemporal variogram models for estimating the abundance of American horseshoe crabs along the mid-Atlantic coast in collaboration with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC). He has presented this work at numerous professional scientific conferences and written and co-authored many reports to the ASMFC. Proficient in a variety of software, including R, OpenBugs, GitHub, and ArcGIS, Mr. Wong also excels in the field with boat maintenance, towing, trailer operation, vessel operation, and open water diving.

Mr. Wong graduated from Virgina Tech with a M.Sc. in Fisheries Ecology in 2023 and holds a B.S.(2020) in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation from the University of Florida.