Guillermo (Ta) Herrera

Guillermo (Ta) Herrera came to Bowdoin in July 2000. En route, he received his A.B. in Biology (with emphases on sociobiology and population dynamics) from Harvard College, worked in a human cancer genetics lab for two years, then attended the University of Washington, receiving a M.S. in Quantitative Ecology & Resource Management, and M.A. and PhD degrees in Economics.

Ta’s research deals with renewable natural resources and the communities which utilize them. His recent work has examined the management of multispecies fisheries, focusing on the use of regulations with a spatial component and on strategic interactions between harvesters and regulators. His research has been published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Marine Resource Economics, Natural Resource Modeling, the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Science, and Marine Policy.

Ta currently holds a position as Adjunct Scientist at the Marine Policy Center of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where he spent a 2003-05 sabbatical.

Together with Michael Neubert (Biology, WHOI) and Suzanne Lenhart (Mathematics, U. of Tennessee-Knoxville), Ta recently completed a project, funded by the National Science Foundation to develop “a spatial theory for renewable resource economics.” Ta also has NSF funding, through the Coupled Natural and Human Systems Program, to study biological and economic connections Gulf of Maine fisheries. His collaborators on this project are from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, U. of Maine, and USM.

More recently, Ta has become involved in a project in Miches, a municipality in the Dominican Republic. Ta and his colleagues from Columbia University are endeavoring to implement a sustainable system of local governance of small-scale fisheries in this community, and to better understand what makes such a system succeed.

Ta teaches microeconomics (principles and theory) as well as environmental and natural resource economics. He has supervised a number of independent study and honors students in their research of matters related to environmental regulation and natural resource use.

A retired (or at least hibernating) competitive cyclist, Ta is faculty advisor to the Bowdoin Cycling Club and, on a good day, can keep up with most of them. He lives in Brunswick with his wife Jerry, their sons Oscar and Nico, and their boxer Brook. Both Ta and Jerry compete in triathlons in their spare time.