Hans Dam is Professor in the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Connecticut, UConn. Dam received his Ph.D., working with the late Bill Peterson, at Stony Brook University.  Dam’s dissertation examined copepod grazing dynamics in Long Island Sound.

Dam was a postdoctoral fellow with Mike Roman at the University of Maryland, where he studied zooplankton-mediated carbon fluxes in the Sargasso Sea.

Dam was part of the of the JGOFS program looking at zooplankton carbon and nitrogen cycling in the Equatorial Pacific. Since then, he has worked on the role of copepods on DMS cycling and copepod-toxic dinoflagellates interactions. Currently, he uses experimental evolution to explore copepod adaptation to global change.

Dam has trained a generation of copepodologists, including 14 Ph.D. students and numerous postdoctoral researchers. Dam was the 2021 recipient of the UConn Alumni Faculty Excellence in Graduate Education Award. He is also a member of several learned societies, most notably a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Dam has been a WAC member for more than 30 years.  He served as WAC Secretary from 2014­ to 2022 and as WAC President from 2022 to 2024. Dam delivered the 15^th ICOC Maxilliped Lecture. He is currently serving as Past-President of WAC.