Jeffrey R. Dement  

I was born at St. Peter’s Hospital in New Brunswick, NJ and lived in Old Bridge Township until the age of 5. I lived in Ocean Township until the age of 15, when my family moved to Colts Neck, NJ, where I attended Christian Brothers Academy in Lincroft. It was in Colts Neck where I truly realized my passion for the natural world, as we lived directly on the Swimming River Reservoir, and I was in my “backyard” every day after school during my high school years. Fish and fishing have always been my primary interests and pastimes, although I am also particularly fond of trees and birds (in that order). At the age of 18 I attended a wilderness awareness, survival and tracking school run by Tom Brown Jr. (“The Tracker”). This educational experience forever solidified in my mind the path that my education and future career would take. Nonetheless, I was distracted from my goals by the lure of money and the family business, where I worked as a Union Ironworker (Local 480 Elizabeth, NJ) for 20 years. I worked as a structural ironworker on many large projects throughout New Jersey and New York, with the extensive list including bridges, high-rise buildings, oil refineries, warehouses, shopping malls, and power generation stations. And since everyone always asks, I’ll just go ahead and answer the most common question I’m hit with when someone learns that I was a “high-steel” ironworker- Q: “What’s the highest you were ever on open iron?” A: 33 stories on a high-rise near the Holland Tunnel in Jersey City, NJ. My most memorable and enjoyable experience here at Cook College has been working with Dr. Mark Vodak as a teaching assistant for his dendrology class for the past two years. I truly enjoyed working with the students and the other TA’s, as well as with Dr. Vodak, who in my opinion is one of the finest professors that Rutgers/Cook has to offer. This experience has instilled in me a passion for teaching others the ways of the natural world and has given me a greater respect for the trials that my wife Elizabeth experiences in her career as a teacher for the Long Branch school system. My passion for fish, fishing and fisheries related issues drove me to pursue an internship last summer at Sandy Hook, working for the American Littoral Society as a teaching naturalist. I absolutely loved the position and haven’t had a summer go by so fast in a long time. Well as fate would have it, I have recently landed a full time position at the Littoral Society, as the Director of the American Littoral Society Fish-Tagging Program. The program has over 1000 taggers throughout the United States (mostly on the East Coast), that tag 20,000-30,000 fish annually, with the tag return data being published annually in the society’s newsletter, The Underwater Naturalist, along with being sent to NMFS scientists at NOAA’s Woods Hole Laboratory for inclusion into the dataset used in making fisheries management decisions. I have been married to my wife Elizabeth (Bette) for 11 years, and we have 2 sons, Kevin and Keith, ages 9 and 7 respectively. We presently live in Neptune, a stones throw from Monmouth County’s Shark-River Park.