Sally Songer
Quality Lead for Cefas’ Fisheries International Centre of Excellence
Sally is the Quality lead for Cefas’ Fisheries International Centre of Excellence, and the Group Manager for the Aquatic Surveys, Evidence and Advice Group, which includes teams working on age determination, fisheries-independent surveys, data quality and specialist staff working on elasmobranchs, salmon and freshwater fish, and non-native fish species.
After studying a degree in zoology and physiology at the University of East Anglia, Sally joined Cefas in 2001. Sally has been involved in many areas of fisheries work during her time at Cefas, including otolith processing and age determination, fisheries-independent and dependant surveys, and fisheries systems.
Within ICES’ science community, Sally is Co-chair of the Working Group on Biological Parameters (WGBIOP) and has participated in numerous specialist workshops themed around age determination, age validation and maturity staging. Sally has also participated in projects on automated age determination and has an interest in archiving of historic samples.
Sally has experience of working with and auditing to ISO 17025 and ISO 9001 standards and was the lead scientist responsible for the ISO 17025 accreditation of the Otolith processing and age determination function at Cefas in 2009. Cefas was the first laboratory globally to be accredited in this way for this kind of work. Sally is an experienced people manager and has a keen interest in maintaining excellence in key skills and techniques as well as in continual improvement of processes.
