Juan Carlos Villaseñor-Derbez graduated from the Marine Sciences School (UABC, Mexico) with a B.Sc. in Oceanography. He was then hired as a Field Technician by the Mexican NGO Comunidad y Biodiversidad (COBI), where he worked closely with fishing communities in Mexico to promote sustainable fisheries and marine conservation. In this role, he also performed oceanographic and ecological monitoring in marine reserves that were being established by fishermen along the Baja Peninsula. Juan Carlos also consulted independently for the Mexican Tuna Purse Seiner Fleet´s Research Trust, where he maintained a database used to inform fisheries management. 
 
Juan Carlos came to the Bren School in 2015 as a Latin American Fisheries Fellow, where he obtained his Master of Environmental Science and & Management specializing in Coastal Marine Resources Management.  His Masters project focused on developing an app that allows fishers, managers, and academics evaluate marine reserves with standardized methodologies.
 
Now as a Ph.D. student in the Gaines Lab, Juan Carlos plans to perform research that broadens interdisciplinary knowledge of fisheries management, marine ecology, and human interactions with the environment, with an eye towards informing environmental policy and climate change adaptation for marine natural resources management. His broader research goal is to combine ecological data with economic instruments through data science to understand how best to design and manage marine reserves under current and future socioeconomic and environmental conditions.