About Pelagos

Aaron is President and Board Chair of Pelagos, and the lead architect of the Fisheries Intelligence Platform. He authored the platform’s original design and its initial codebase.

Trained in marine and coastal ecology, science communication, and policy, Aaron has spent more than 20 years in natural resource management and conservation, including work at NOAA, the U.S. EPA, and The Pew Charitable Trusts. He has worked with federal and state decision makers to develop new policies and protect foundational laws like the Magnuson-Stevens Act, helped create more than 300,000 square miles of marine protected areas, and led campaigns advancing forage fisheries management, oyster reef and seagrass restoration, and conservation aquaculture.

At Pew, Aaron served as a senior officer on the organization’s project to conserve marine life in the United States, where his work included the Supporting Oyster Aquaculture and Restoration (SOAR) initiative with The Nature Conservancy. He serves on NOAA’s Marine and Coastal Area-based Management Advisory Committee and is a member of The Explorers Club and the Ecological Society of America.

Steve is Chief Science Officer and Treasurer of Pelagos, where he directs the fisheries science and data architecture behind the products. He is the principal of Cynoscion Environmental Consulting, a Morehead City, North Carolina firm advising agencies and industry on fisheries management, coastal ecosystems, and marine resource policy.

He came to Pelagos from NOAA Fisheries, where he was a research fisheries biologist at the Southeast Fisheries Science Center in 2024 and 2025, coordinating the IRA-funded Red Snapper Recreational Data Improvement Initiative. From 2018 to 2021 he represented North Carolina on the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council, serving as its vice chair in 2020 and 2021 and chairing the joint South Atlantic and Gulf Council workgroup on Section 102 of the Modernizing Recreational Fisheries Management Act.

Most of his career was at the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries, where he rose to Fisheries Management Section Chief, running the state’s fisheries monitoring surveys, biological data operations, and fishery management plan development with about 75 staff across six offices. He has authored peer-reviewed science papers and holds an M.S. in biology and marine biology from UNC Wilmington and a B.S. in fisheries, wildlife, and conservation biology from NC State. He has worked the process from three sides: running a state program, voting at the council, and inside the federal science enterprise.

Purcie is Chief Executive Officer, Vice President, and Corporate Secretary of Pelagos, and one of its co-founders. An environmental attorney, she is the founder of Bennett-Nickerson Environmental Consulting, where she advises on fisheries governance, environmental review, and marine resource policy.

Her practice spans more than 18 years of environmental law and policy across the Magnuson-Stevens Act, NEPA, the Endangered Species Act, and the Marine Mammal Protection Act. She currently serves as the contracted governance reviewer for the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council, and she is the architect of NEPANav, Pelagos’s environmental-review product.

Jake is the technology lead at Pelagos. He owns the platform architecture, the engineering workflows, and the integration of the tools and services that make up the stack, from the data corpus and database architecture to the AI pipeline behind the tools practitioners use.

He has been building conservation technology since 2024. Projects include a national petition platform used in a marine conservation campaign, an AI pipeline for extracting species data from scientific literature, and a comprehensive U.S. marine-conservation policy database. He also runs a small AI consultancy in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Jake holds a B.A. in Economics with a Data Science concentration from Lawrence University.