Bruce Corliss has announced the appointment of Professor Dennis Nixon as Director of the Rhode Island Sea Grant Program following an internal search within URI this spring. Dennis is a Professor of Marine Affairs in the College of the Environment and Life Sciences and has served as Associate Dean for Research and Administration at GSO since 2009. Prior to that, he served for 8 years as the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at the College of the Environment and Life Sciences. He has been a faculty member at the University of Rhode Island for the past 37 years, teaching courses in the area of marine and coastal law. He is the author of over 50 articles and the casebook Marine and Coastal Law, first published in 1994 and released in a second edition in 2010. He was the co-founder of the very successful joint-degree program in Marine Affairs and Law with the Roger Williams University Law School. He is also the legal advisor and risk manager for the University National Oceanographic Laboratory System, funded by the National Science Foundation, providing advice to all of the U.S. academic research vessel fleet for the past 26 years. He has had a long association with Rhode Island Sea Grant, beginning in 1975 as a graduate student, and was later funded to carry out work in fishing vessel safety and insurance that culminated in the Commercial Fishing Industry Vessel Safety Act of 1988. In addition, he was instrumental in establishing the Rhode Island Sea Grant Marine Law Program and has served as a member of the Rhode Island Sea Grant Senior Advisory Council for over a decade. He has an intimate knowledge of Rhode Island’s coast and surrounding waters, and is uniquely qualified to bring together the academic and public communities to help solve emerging coastal problems in Rhode Island.