Marisa Litz is a research scientist with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife in Olympia, Washington and serves on the Coho Technical Committee of the Pacific Salmon Commission. Marisa’s unit conducts life cycle monitoring of native and non-native fishes in coastal Washington. She is interested in understanding how environmental variability throughout freshwater and marine phases affects the abundance, productivity, spatial distribution, and life history diversity of Pacific salmon and trout. One of the projects she oversees is a full capture trap and weir that enumerates juvenile and adult coho salmon returning to western Washington. The project produces estimates of marine survival that have been used to forecast coho run sizes in western Washington for forty years. Marisa received her M.S. and Ph.D. from Oregon State University working with scientists from NOAA where her work focused on the feeding ecology of juvenile salmonids based on data collected from surveys in the northern California Current.