Vanessa Jaiteh is a transdisciplinary marine scientist with broad interests in issues concerning ecological and social sustainability in tropical fisheries. Early in her training, she realised that the natural sciences alone did not allow her to fully capture the issues she encountered through her studies. In her PhD research Dr. Jaiteh combined methods from the natural and social sciences to study the eastern Indonesian shark fishery. This experience stirred her curiosity in exploring unconventional approaches to management, conservation and labour questions in coastal and oceanic fisheries. Over the last fifteen years, she have lived and worked in Australia, Indonesia, Palau, New Caledonia and Ghana, conducting research on anthropogenic impacts on large marine predators, including fisheries bycatch, poaching, and oil and gas exploration; shark fisheries and fishing livelihoods; and fisher safety and labour abuse in fisheries spanning all fisheries sectors. In between research projects, she has worked on various consultancies throughout Micronesia and Southeast Asia. From 2017-2019 she served as a fisheries scientist for the government of the Republic of Palau, where she was immersed in the realities of natural resource management in a Large Ocean State. Simultaneously, this work exposed her to regional fisheries science and management bodies, which led to her first postdoc, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), on bycatch in oceanic longline fisheries targeting tuna. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow with the University of Nottingham’s Rights Lab Ecosystems and Environment Programme, hosted in Ghana by the Fisheries Committee of the West-Central Gulf of Guinea (FCWC). Her study, also funded by the SNSF, examines the links between fisher safety and working conditions, including their intersections with illegal, unregulated and unreported or under-reported (IUU) fishing activity and other fisheries crime in the industrial, semi-industrial and artisanal fisheries of Ghana.