Dr. Rothschild is the Montgomery Charter Professor of Marine Science and former Dean of the School for Marine Science and Technology at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Prior to joining the University of Massachusetts, Professor Rothschild held professorships at the University of Maryland and the University of Washington. He has had faculty or visiting scientist affiliations with the University of Hawaii; Scripps Institution of Oceanography; Rosensteil School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, University of Miami; Institut fur Meereskunde, University of Kiel; Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; and Harvard University.
In government, Dr. Rothschild was a Charter Member of the Senior Executive Service in the Department of Commerce. He has served as Senior Policy Advisor to the Administrator of NOAA; Director, Office of Policy and Planning, NMFS; Director of the Southwest Fisheries Science Center, La Jolla; and Deputy Director of the Northwest and Alaska Fisheries Science Center, Seattle. He managed NOAA’s implementation of the Fisheries Conservation and Management Act of 1976. He has been a consultant to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, developing the Indian Ocean Programme Plan and a fishery policy for Namibia. He consulted for the Department of Justice on the Exxon Valdez oil spill case. He has consulted for the governments of the United Kingdom, Korea, Egypt, Peru, France, and the Republic of Ireland on various aspects of oceanography and fishery management. He has served on numerous national and international committees and working groups. He has been the Secretary of the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU), Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR) and served three terms as a member of the Ocean Studies Board (OSB) of the National Academy of Science. He served two terms as the Chair of the Standing Committee on Research and Statistics (SCRS) of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic tunas. He played a leading role in organizing the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP)–Global Ocean Ecosystem Dynamics Program (GLOBEC). He served as the first Chairman of the GLOBEC Scientific Committee.
He was Co-Chairman of the Massachusetts Fisheries Recovery Commission with the Honorable Robert Durand and was also the Co-Director of the Massachusetts Marine Fisheries Institute. His research has contributed to the fundamental understanding of fish stock recruitment, and to the role of physical forcing on ocean biodynamics, in particular, the role of small-scale turbulent flow on plankton encounter rates. His work on the effects of the interactions between turbulent flow and plankton dynamics is cited frequently in scientific literature. He is the author of “Dynamics of Marine Fish Populations” published by Harvard University Press. He has edited five books and is the author of one-hundred research papers. From 1996 until June 2011 he was on the Editorial Board of the “The Sea: Ideas and Observations on Progress in the Study of the Seas,” which is published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and served as coeditor of Volume 12 “The Sea: Biological-Physical Interactions in the Sea.”
In 2003, Dr. Rothschild received the American Institute of Fishery Research Biologists Outstanding Achievement Award. In 2007 he received the NOAA Sustainability Fisheries Leadership Award. In 2008 he received the SouthCoast Man of the Year Award (awarded by the New Bedford Standard Times). In September 2011, Dr. Rothschild received the Oscar Elton Sette Award, which is given to an individual who has sustained excellence in marine fishery biology through research, teaching, and administration. In 2012, Dr. Rothschild received the Man of the Year Award from the Prince Henry Society of Massachusetts and the Highliner Lifetime Achievement Award from National Fisherman magazine; and he gave the President’s Lecture at the 100th anniversary celebration of Shanghai Ocean University.