Ralph Imondi, PhD
Executive Director
Coastal Marine Biolabs
Integrative Biosciences Institute
Ventura Harbor, CA

Ralph pursued his doctoral research in the field of developmental neuroscience at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and his postdoctoral research at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. He is currently the Executive Director of Coastal Marine Biolabs (CMB), a harbor-based NGO that conducts a wide-range of education and research activities that benefit the VSE project. Over the last decade, CMB has become a focal point for interdisciplinary collaborations centered on the creation of new instructional models and web-based technologies to facilitate the integration of science research and education. During this time, CMB's state-of-the-art biosciences facility has supported a wide range of research and outreach activities ranging from environmental water quality assessments of coastal watersheds, to marine biotoxin monitoring, to DNA-based inventories of marine indicator species, to eco-morphologic studies of rockfishes. Through large-scale funding awards from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, CMB has developed, deployed, and evaluated a series of regional and national Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) programs that respond to science education reform agenda and projected workforce shortages of STEM professionals. Ralph's involvement in the VSE takes him back to his roots in Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay, where he supplemented his summer income by harvesting quahogs with a high school buddy using a borrowed work skiff equipped with bullrakes and other tools of the trade. He has called Ventura his home since 2005.