Madan M. Dey, Ph.D., chair and professor in the Department of Agricultural Sciences at Texas State University, has been named Fellow of the International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade (IIFET).
The honor comes in recognition of Dey’s enduring contributions to the economics of aquaculture, fisheries, and seafood trade through research, teaching, service, and policy impact.
Dey will deliver the keynote address, “A Fish Is a Fish Is a Fish? Unpacking Demand Heterogeneity, Accessibility, and Market Dynamics for Global Aquaculture and Fisheries Planning,” during IIFET’s 2026 biennial conference Aug. 17-21 in Tórshavn, Faroe Islands.
With more than 35 years of post-Ph.D. experience spanning WorldFish, the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff and TXST, Dey has built an international reputation as a leading fisheries and aquaculture economist. His work is distinguished by an unusually wide reach, spanning aquaculture, capture fisheries and trade economics, from global supply-and-demand projections to detailed household-level studies in some of the world’s most data-scarce regions.
Dey has published more than 125 peer-reviewed journal articles, several books, and 46 book chapters, amassing more than 9,300 citations and an h-index of 51. He has been named to Stanford University’s list of the Top 2% Most Influential Scientists in his field for several consecutive years. His research includes two publications in Nature and one in Nature Communications, work recognized for its role in demonstrating the contributions of aquatic foods to human nutrition and health.
Dey has been a pioneer in disaggregated seafood demand analysis, particularly in lower-income countries, and led development of the widely used AsiaFish model, which has informed fish supply, demand and trade projections across Asia, Africa and the Pacific. His leadership on multidisciplinary tilapia and carp genetic improvement programs in the 1990s helped drive substantial growth in Asian aquaculture production, work the CGIAR’s standing panel on impact assessment identified as a “best practice” in the field. More recently, his research has extended to applied experimental auction and consumer willingness-to-pay studies, price transmission along seafood value chains, and the economic impacts of climate change adaptation in Pacific coral triangle nations.
In the U.S., Dey has led influential research on catfish and seafood marketing, applying scanner-data analysis to better understand consumer demand and industry dynamics, work that has directly informed U.S. catfish marketing strategy.
A dedicated mentor, Dey has guided two generations of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers into successful careers across academia, government, and industry worldwide. He has served as section editor of the journal Aquaculture since 2021 and on the editorial board of Aquaculture Economics and Management. His leadership roles include vice president (2009-2022) and current director for North America of the International Association of Aquaculture Economics and Management (IAAEM), Regional Director of WorldFish (2004-2007) and chair of the Department of Agricultural Sciences at TXST (2016-2026).