Leon Tran is a PhD student at the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology and a 2025 National Marine Fisheries Service-Sea Grant Fellow through the University of Hawaiʻi Sea Grant College Program. His proposed work, titled “Incorporating physiological processes into habitat suitability predictions for marine fisheries in Hawaiʻi,” will use mechanistic modeling to explore how Indo-Pacific fisheries respond to ocean warming. By integrating empirical data on thermal performance in collaboration with the Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, he aims to improve the forecasts of habitat suitability for marine fisheries. He is advised by Dr. Jacob Johansen, Dr. Lisa McManus, and Dr. Erik Franklin, and his NOAA mentor, Dr. Tye Kindinger, at the Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center.

Originally from South Carolina, Leon completed his BS degree in biology and environmental science at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, SC. As an Ernest F. Hollings Scholar, he worked with Dr. James Morris at NOAAʻs Beaufort Laboratory in NC, contributing to the development of passive acoustic methods to monitor invasive lionfish in the Western Atlantic. For his PhD research, Leon is describing physiological responses of commonly fished, reef-dwelling species to water temperature and hypoxia. He will then use these data to model potential shifts in habitat suitability for reef fisheries under different environmental scenarios.