adds rowan survival training blog

Author: gavinfay

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+---
+title: "Safety and Survival Training by Fishing Partnership at SMAST"
+author: Rowan Ignatius
+date: 2025-10-24
+slug: fsspfall25
+categories:
+  - blog 
+  - students
+  - training
+image: tank1.jpg
+editor: 
+  markdown: 
+    wrap: 72
+---
+
+## Safety and Survival Training at SMAST
+
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+On Thursday, October 16, 2025, I attended the Fishing Partnership Support Services (FPSS) at SMAST conducted Safety and Survival Training at New Bedford's waterfront. The workshop convened researchers, commercial fishermen, and recreational anglers for essential emergency preparedness instruction. Offered at no cost to participants, this reflects FPSS's sustained commitment to advancing safety standards.
+
+Fishing, whether commercial or recreational, remains one of the most perilous professions and pastimes. The industry's inherent risks underscore the importance of comprehensive safety training. The workshop provided participants with practical, hands-on experience in critical survival techniques, including accessing Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacons, Signal Flares, MAYDAY Calls, Man Overboard Recovery, Firefighting, Flooding & Damage Control, Opioid Overdose Response, Survival suits and distress signaling techniques.
+As several fishermen shared stories of life-threatening situations they had faced at sea, including man-overboard (MOB) incidents. Hearing these firsthand accounts really made me realize the critical importance of this training.
+
+Russell Kingman and Nathan Winterson, my instructors for the day, made the class engaging, funny, and interesting, while still effectively teaching essential life-saving skills, making it easier to absorb critical information that could one day save lives. In addition, FPSS provided all participants with Narcan opioid overdose sprays, further supporting preparedness for emergencies both at sea and ashore.
+
+I am looking forward to the CPR and First Aid training that will be hosted by FPSS on January 13, 2026, at Fort Tabor Community Center, New Bedford, MA.
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blog/2025-10-24-safetytraining-ri/index.qmd

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 **Rowan Ignatius**\
 MS student, Data Science\
 *rignatius\@umassd.edu*\
 
+Rowan is a Master’s Candidate in Data Science at UMassD who joined the Fay Lab this Fall 2025. He grew up in the coastal city of Chennai, India, and after undergrad spent over five years working in industry, first as a Database Administrator at BICS managing SQL databases and managing ERP tools, and later as a Technical Solution Engineer at Zoho Corporation optimizing large scale databases and automation scripts. During his graduate studies at UMass Dartmouth, Rowan has focused on building end-to-end data systems, including a production-ready IoT pipeline for real-time sensor monitoring, and a federated database system that integrates healthcare and insurance data across SQL Server and Neo4j platforms. He's particularly drawn to problems involving privacy-preserving machine learning and distributed systems, which led him to explore federated learning frameworks and explainable AI techniques for complex data patterns. Before joining the Lab, his research focused on adaptive partitioning for AI workload streaming platforms like Kafka and Kinesis. Now, Rowan is excited to bring his experience and skills into fisheries research, especially working on machine learning surrogate models to help speed up Biological reference point calculations.
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