William Silvert

Who is William Silvert?

William Silvert is a theoretical ecologist who in September 1998, took early retirement from the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada. He moved to Portugal in February 2000 and lived for a while near Lisbon with his wife Maria Emília Cunha, who works at IPIMAR, the Portuguese Fisheries Institute. He currently holds a position there as a Senior Research Fellow in the the Departamento de Ambiente Aquático (Department of the Aquatic Environment).

Currently both he and his wife are living in the Algarve, where he is associated with the University of the Algarve in Faro. They have a home in Peral and his wife works at the aquaculture centre of IPIMAR. He has branched out into the restaurant business and is the owner of the Centre for Gastronomic Research, otherwise known by its Portuguese name, O Centro de Investigação Gastronómica, or CIG.

What does he do?

Although officially retired, he remains active in science, and has been attending conferences, writing papers, and looking for further teaching and research opportunities. He is also available for scientific editing and consulting, and has set up a one-man consultancy called Ciê ncia Silvert (Science by Silvert).

During 2001 he worked on a number of projects, including modelling aquaculture impacts, population biology and conservation of Nephrops, and the application of the Traffic Light Method to fisheries management using an extension of the method based on fuzzy set theory. He is also involved in modelling the dynamics of Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs). He is very interested in applications of fuzzy set theory and has written several papers on the subject, including a general survey of its potential applications called Fuzzy Aspects of Systems Science and a recent paper on Fuzzy Indices of Environmental Conditions.

In November 2001 he taught a short course on ecological modelling at the Universidade do Algarve in Faro, Portugal. In March 2002 he taught another short course on Fuzzy Systems, Modelling and Applications at the University of Osnabrück in Germany. Information on his modelling courses can be found on the Modelling website that he runs.

He has been involved in several EU projects such as EFEP and ECASA. In November 2005 he visited the University of Haifa where he gave several lectures on fuzzy set theory, decision support systems, and related topics.

Further Information

For more information, you can see a more detailed biographical sketch, read about his research interests, and look through his list of papers (some of these are included here), or you can view a shorter list organised by topic. Some ideas which have not been developed into papers but which are in the draft or discussion phase are listed as "notions". For those of you who prefer downloadable PDF files, some of the papers are available in Adobe PDF format here.

Presentations (generally PowerPoint) for recent courses and related reports are available on a separate web site devoted to modelling.

He has a separate site dealing for his consulting activites and is available for scientific editing and consulting. There are also links to areas of science in which he is interested and to some degree involved, such as Harmful Algal Blooms.

Outside of Science

If you have nothing better to do, you may enjoy learning a bit about his family. Some other useful and/or interesting pages of a non-scientific type can be viewed by clicking here.

A recent project is the creation of a website for expatriates, mainly but not exclusively for those living in Portugal.

Currently he is the owner of a café, which opened in July 2007. Check out the website, CIG (Centro de Investigação Gastronómica).

A complete Table of Contents for this site is available.

Developed and maintained by William Silvert.