Registration is now open for the 7th International Symposium on River Science, held in Davis, California from Oct 6-9, 2025! Early Bird Registration will remain open until 15 August 2025.

“Where are they now:”  is a new blog series on the California WaterBlog, written in the voices of our alumni. The series will celebrate the many alumni who got their start at the Center for Watershed Sciences (CWS) and have now gone on to bigger and better things. Blog posts from the “Where are they now:” series will be peppered throughout our regularly scheduled line up blogs, and they will highlight both former students and past employees of CWS. We hope you enjoy their stories in their own words!

Next up is Dr. Anna Sturrock, who was at CWS from 2016 – 2020. 

I worked at CWS from 2016 to 2020 as a Project Scientist in Rachel Johnson and Carson Jeffres’ lab (JJ lab). During this time I led a series of research projects focused on understanding how different hydrologic conditions influence juvenile salmon migration behaviour, and the capacity of the Sacramento San-Joaquin Delta and San Francisco Estuary to support salmon rearing and growth. It was like a full health check of the stock complex, exploring the abundance of juveniles produced by each river and hatchery each year and monitoring their diet, body condition, growth rates and migration patterns through their treacherous journey to the sea. It’s been so wonderful to see how the JJ lab has continued this important monitoring effort to today, with the data analyses currently being led by an amazing postdoctoral researcher called Kohma Arai.

My favourite memory of my time at CWS has to be our weekly lab meetings and my final send-off meeting. It’s hard to describe just how lovely, supportive, smart and fun everyone is there. It felt like a family, and still does! I had my second child two months early in 2017 (almost gave birth at the IEP conference in Folsom!) and everyone was so incredibly supportive, making me food, and supporting me scientifically and emotionally. It was really hard to leave CWS, especially given that it was in the height of COVID, but my years there remain to be some of the best years of my life.

I am now an Associate Professor at the University of Essex in the UK, still doing a lot of salmon research in the UK, Europe and USA, but also working on the migration patterns, connectivity, growth and management of marine species such as European sea bass, anchovies, plaice, cod, and even squid! I was lucky enough to secure a UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship soon after moving back to the UK, which allowed me to grow my team here and to branch out into new questions in areas such as ecotoxicology (pollution exposure) and hypoxia (low oxygen levels in the water). I continue to collaborate a lot with my CWS family – Rachel, Carson, Malte, Flora, George, Mir and Jeff to name but a few – and I could never have gotten my position or grants without their help and mentorship, and the hard and soft skills they gave me in sample preparation, data analysis, people management, science communication, salmon ecology and management. I have even created modified versions of CWS’s famous “Wheel of Misfortune” – one as a video game (download it and watch a lovely animation we made about marine connectivity here – www.tinyurl.com/MFCTeacherPack) and a physical wheel that we recently took to the British Science Festival (see image). 

My main advice for early career folks is to follow your passion and to not give up. Drive and determination are so much more important than specific skills and knowledge. You can learn the latter, but the people I see going places are the ones that never give up! Also, keep your emails short and to the point, always try to reply to people quickly (even with just a placeholder saying you will reply properly soon… I actually need to take my own advice on this!), and always say thank you. On that note, thank you to everyone at CWS for everything, you totally changed my life!

About the Author

Dr. Anna Sturrock is a Senior Lecturer (Assoc. Prof.) at the University of Essex, UK, and a UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellow after securing a £1.7 million grant to develop new chemical tools to support fisheries ecology and management. She completed her BSc hons at the University of Edinburgh, her MSc at the University of Otago in New Zealand as a Leverhulme Trust Study Abroad Fellow, and her PhD at the University of Southampton and the Centre for the Environmental Fisheries and Aquaculture Science via a FSBI Studentship. From 2012 to 2020 she was a senior researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz, Berkeley and then Davis, leading a number of projects with NOAA, the US Fish and Wildlife Service and CA Department of Fish and Wildlife. Along with an obsession for using natural tags to reconstruct patterns in animal movement and health, she is passionate about science communication (see About tab), translational ecology and mentorship.  

Her spare time is mostly spent wrangling her two children, but she also enjoys playing football, dabbling on the French horn, skiing and hiking.

Further Reading

Sturrock, AM, Ogaz, M, Neal, K, Corline, NJ, Peek, R, Myers, D, Schluep, S, Levinson, M, Johnson, RC, Jeffres, CA (2022). Floodplain trophic subsidies in a modified river network: Managed foodscapes of the future? Landscape Ecology 37, 2991–3009. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-022-01526-5

Sturrock, AM, Carlson, SM, Wikert, JD, Heyne, T, Nusslé, S, Merz, J, Sturrock, HJW, Johnson, RC (2020) Unnatural selection of salmon life histories in a modified riverscape. Global Change Biology 26, 1235-1247. <linked here>

Coleman, L., Johnson, RC, Cordoleani, F, Phillis, CC, Sturrock, AM 2022. Variation in Juvenile Salmon Growth Opportunities Across a Shifting Habitat Mosaic. San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science. https://doi.org/10.15447/sfews.2022v20iss1art1

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If this story resonated with you, consider making a gift to the Center to help us create more meaningful opportunities for students across our programs. Want to support the specific experience featured here? You can do that too, by supporting the CWS Ecogeomorphology Fund and CWS Fishes, Floodplains, and Springs Research.