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Middle & Upper School Science |
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Anne-Marie Eklund teaches middle school and high school science and is the advisor to the 9th and 10th graders. She moved to Bend with her family in August 2007 to start a new life far away from the big city of Miami, Florida, where she spent 17 years as a fishery biologist for NOAA-Fisheries and Everglades National Park. She grew up in Memphis, Tennessee but headed for the white sandy beaches of Florida's Gulf Coast for school at Eckerd, College where she studied marine biology - a natural choice at a college with over a mile of coast-line. Directly after getting her B.S. in Biology, she attended University of Delaware's, College of Marine Studies and received her M.S. in Marine Biology and Biochemistry. After three years up north, she longed for Florida again, and she started working at Everglades National Park as a research fishery biologist. Her best memories of that job are flying in helicopters and riding air boats to get to remote sample sites in the marsh. Longing for bigger fish and saltier waters, she transferred to NOAA-Fisheries and began a long career studying reef fish ecology and grouper population biology. During that time, she completed her Ph.D. at the University of Miami. Her dissertation was on the effect of reef habitat complexity on predation and survival of juvenile reef fish. She spent many years studying the recovery of over fished grouper populations in the Gulf of Mexico, the Florida Keys and the Bahamas.
Although she enjoyed her career aboard ships and small boats, fishing and SCUBA diving, she took a break from it all when she had her twin daughters, Jane and Jessica. The whole world changed when those girls were born, and she decided to spend time with them at home. They have now grown into nature-loving 7 year olds and as a mom, she has found her true passion is teaching. She taught middle school science at Cushman School in Miami before relocating to Central Oregon. One goal in moving was to get the kids outside in wide-open spaces, enjoying nature, and one way she does that is through the science camp she teaches every summer. She and her family enjoy traveling and camping. After one winter in Bend, she is totally in love with snow-skiing at Mt. Bachelor. She never tires of looking at or being in the mountains, so much so that she doesn't even miss the ocean.
