Rollie Barnaby, a commercial fisheries Sea Grant Extension Educator, is the recipient of the 2008 Northeast Sea Grant Outstanding Outreach Individual Award. Barnaby, who recently retired, received this award for his role in creating and fostering the Northeast Consortium.

The award is given out every two years to provide peer recognition of outstanding outreach programs developed by individuals or multiple collaborators. The Northeast Sea Grant network is composed of programs in the states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New York.

The Consortium is a collaboration of UNH, the University of Maine, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Since 2000, it has funded more than 170 collaborative research projects involving commercial fishermen, fishing industry associations and businesses, scientists, students and research institutions.

Barnaby’s previous work as a commercial fisherman made him aware of challenges between fisheries regulators, environmentalists, scientists and fishermen. "When I started working at UNH as a Sea Grant Extension educator, I realized very quickly that one of the most important things I could do for fisheries management, marine users and the marine environment was to get stakeholders talking and working together," Barnaby explains.

Barnaby helped create the Consortium in 1999 as a way to encourage and fund effective, equal partnerships among commercial fishermen, scientists and other stakeholders to engage in collaborative research and projects in the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank.