Our Team
Niels Lindquist
Niels grew up in Gainesville, Florida, where he enjoyed scuba diving in North Florida’s springs, surfing along the east Florida coast and fishing Florida’s Gulf coast at Cedar Key. After graduating high school in 1977, Niels worked as a carpenter to earn money to fund surfing expeditions to the Bahamas, central America, the South Pacific and Australia. In 1979, Niels started his studies at the University of Florida, receiving his B.S. degree in chemistry in 1983. He then conducted Ph.D. research in natural products chemistry and chemical ecology at the University of California at San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He continued marine chemical ecology research as a post-doctoral associate and then faculty member at the UNC Institute of Marine Sciences (IMS) in Morehead City, North Carolina. For many years, Lindquist studied coral reefs, but in 2010, his research interests turned to North Carolina’s oysters.
David "Clammerhead" Cessna
David grew up in his family’s ancestral region of Carteret County, North Carolina. Beginning at the ripe old age of six, David began learning firsthand from his grandfather the many wonders of commercial fishing and mysteries surrounding shellfish and shellfish harvesting. Despite warnings from his grandfather to run away from commercial fishing as a career, David’s early experiences drew him more deeply to it. Over the next four decades, his adventures and endeavors in commercial fishing gave David extensive experiential knowledge of shellfish, and the interesting nickname, "Clammerhead". Clammerhead worked primarily with shellfish, both in the wild harvest industry and running aquaculture leases for himself and other growers.
Fairley Cessna
Being the son of Clammerhead, Fairley Cessna was exposed to commercial fishing at a young age. A love for the environment leads his goal to restore oyster populations to historic levels, perhaps beyond. Part of Fairley being homeschooled included spending time along the shorelines and marshes, where he also discovered how tightly weaved all of the components of nature were. When he isn’t working on the water, Fairley can usually be found in the marsh or woods with his best friends, Logan and Nikki-Lynn.