Miriam Frost came to Northmoor in 2009, when her husband took a position at the regional marine laboratory, and stayed to build the fisheries group into what it is now. She has been a professor here since 2017.
Her field is stock assessment: the models that turn catch records, survey data and biological sampling into an estimate of a population and a defensible number for how much of it can be removed. The models are old, the data are worse than anyone would like, and the decisions that rest on them affect people's livelihoods directly. Frost describes the work as applied statistics under conditions of moral seriousness.
Her recent research is on assessment for data-poor stocks — the large majority of fished populations worldwide, for which no survey time series exists at all. The methods available are crude and the temptation is to say nothing. Her position is that a crude estimate with an honest uncertainty range is more useful to a manager than silence, and she has spent several years working out how crude is too crude.
Frost teaches AQUA 350 Fisheries Stock Assessment and MPOL 330 Fisheries Policy and Management, which she co-teaches with the policy group. She sits on two regional scientific review panels.