Aldo Grifo-Hahn, B.A.

Aldo grew up in Manhattan, NY and Bethesda, MD and spent much of his youth turning over rocks, selecting excellent sticks, and looking at birds. In college, his interests flitted between geopolitics, environmental conservation and ecology, writing his senior thesis on a population of common snapping turtles in the Tivoli Bays region of New York. His first professional interaction with the marine environment was as a Deckhand/ Educator on the tall ship Sultana on the Chesapeake Bay, and he was hooked.

During the pandemic, he moved to Maine where he worked as an organic farmer, a marine technician, sternman on a lobster boat, and eventually as a technician in a shellfish hatchery in Harpswell. Shellfish work provided the perfect mix of hands-on biology and lab work in the hatchery environment, and stimulating and rewarding physical challenges in the grow out space. While in Maine he worked with sea scallops, hard and surf clams, and of course, eastern oysters. He looks forward to training the next generation of aquaculture workers in Alaska, and working with industry to develop new markets, methods and opportunities for Alaskans in the aquaculture space.