DrSimon Helmut Fischer

I am a visiting researcher at Imperial College London’s Centre for Environmental Policy and I am based at the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Cefas).

My research focuses on improving the management of data-limited fish stocks by developing and testing empirical control rules with the management strategy evaluation (MSE) approach to simulate the entire managed system.

Much of my work is linked to the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), and I have been participating in various ICES working groups and workshops, and as an independent reviewer for assessments and simulations. Since 2023, I have been co-chairing the ICES workshop on developing and testing data-limited approaches.

I completed my PhD on this topic at Imperial College London in 2022. The methods developed during my PhD have become the new standard methods to provide advice on fishing opportunities for ICES category 3 data-limited fish stocks (stocks without analytical stock assessments) and are applied to around 30 fish stocks per year.

My work includes

the generation of operating models from life-history parameters which represent fish stocks and the fishery operating on them,
the exploration of management objectives against which the performance of management procedures can be evaluated,
the analysis of the simulation outputs with statistical methods such as time-series clustering and penalised regression models,
the application of optimisation procedures such as genetic algorithms on top of simulation frameworks in order to optimise management performance,
and the use of high-performance computing (HPC) and massive parallelisation techniques.