PEMSEA and MERIT Welcome Fellow on Communities of Practice

Quezon City, Philippines — Ms. Natalie Degger joins PEMSEA on a one-year fellowship beginning January 2015. The Fellowship Program for Ms. Degger is a collaborative undertaking between PEMSEA and the Centre for Marine Environmental Research and Innovative Technology (MERIT) in Hong Kong, which is a PEMSEA Regional Center of Excellence (RCoE) in Marine Pollution.
Ms. Degger is working on the GEF/World Bank Medium-sized Project on Applying Knowledge Management to Scale up Partnership Investments for Sustainable Development of Large Marine Ecosystems of East Asia and their Coasts. As a member of the KM Project, she is focusing on the following activities:

Preparing a capacity development plan for ICM Learning Centers and local governments to better enable knowledge transfer and technical support;
Initiating the implementation of the capacity development plan by organizing training workshops to strengthen PEMSEA Regional Centers of Excellence (RCoEs) and ICM Learning Centers as a Community of Practice in support of ICM programs at the national and local levels;
Creating and activating a virtual PEMSEA Network of Learning Centers through an online community of practice in the e-portal;
Identifying and developing other services (e.g., roster/directory of experts; directory of related Communities of Practice; online helpdesk) to be included in the e-portal; and
Organizing and conducting the next meeting of PEMSEA's RCoEs/ICM LCs at the East Asian Seas Congress in Danang, Vietnam, in November 2015.

Ms. Degger has Ph.D in Environmental Science from the University of Hong Kong. She has worked with MERIT since 2012 under the direct supervision of Prof. Rudolf Wu, Director of MERIT.