Michele Kuruc is vice president of ocean policy for the World Wildlife Fund-US. She is one of WWF’s global experts on illegal fishing, the international treaties that address it and methods for fighting it. She leads WWF’s US fisheries team focusing on all aspects of fisheries work and on the US government’s work of developing a new, anti-Illegal fish import program. She is also the point person for the IUU work within the WWF global Network which is working collectively on reducing IUU through the many tools needed, such as market leverage, traceability and transparency programs, corporate engagement, improved governance at all levels and technology applications.
Michele came to WWF after more than six years at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, where she worked on illegal fishing and enforcement, anti-piracy, satellite-based vessel monitoring, ecosystem-based management, and traceability. Projects took her to central and Southeast Asia, Central and South America, the Middle East, Africa and the Mediterranean. Michele is a lawyer and has served in the judicial and executive branches of the US government. She was a trial attorney for the United States Department of Justice in the Wildlife and Marine Resources Section and supervised the legal enforcement efforts in the marine area at NOAA. Her cases dealt with polar bears, killer whales, bald eagles, saguaro cacti, wolves, sea turtles, salmon and fisheries of all types.
