Andrew Ransom is a NRE graduate and current Master’s student at the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay. His research focuses on the recent and historical resurgence of Lake Whitefish into Green Bay and its major tributaries. Andrew graduated from UConn in 2015 with a B.S. from Natural Resources and the Environment, and a concentration in Fisheries and Wildlife Management. Following graduation, Andrew worked for the CT DEEP Inland Fisheries division and the Idaho Department of Fish and Game.

Andrew’s interests quickly turned to fisheries at UConn, after he transferred from the Torrington branch campus to the Storrs campus. “I was motivated to explore the world of freshwater fishes ecology and everything I could learn about it,” says Andrew.

Andrew described the importance of his undergraduate education in his career, stating that, “Dr. Jason Vokoun and his graduate students were all extremely important mentors in my undergraduate career.”

Andrew currently studies how the population of Lake Whitefish in Lake Michigan has been declining since the 1990s, 

until around 2010 when the population in the Bay increased dramatically. The resurgence is historical because fish have begun spawning in rivers for the first time in over a century, and that the river populations of Lake Whitefish seem to be breeding much better than the lake populations. Andrew’s research is on spawning locations, timing of spawning migrations, and amount of successful reproduction occurring in these rivers, to confirm if the river populations are in fact doing as well as they seem.