Robert Newberry graduated from the Southern Illinois University with an M.S. in Applied Marine Science in the 1970s. After graduating from college, he studied and worked for several years at oceanographic institutes in New England.
Rob then changed the trajectory of his career and returned to Maryland’s Eastern Shore in order to attend to his family farms and work on the Bay. Rob has always been an avid outdoorsman and has enjoyed hunting and fishing since he was a boy.
Rob and his wife have lived together for over 30 years on family farms on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Rob farms and harvests cash crops on the family farms. He also operates a hunting club that uses portions of his family farms.
Rob has been a Captain for over forty years. He currently operates a charter boat business. He engaged in commercial harvesting of shellfish and finfish in the Chesapeake Bay for over 30 years. He also has engaged in finfish aquaculture.
Rob has advocated on behalf of commercial harvesting for most of his adult life. Through his concern about the increasing governmental and regulatory practices that have detrimentally impacted the domestic commercial seafood industry and his interest in preserving a way of life that he has grown to know and love, Rob came to know Bob Jones of the Southeast Fisheries Association. Rob seeks to develop an organization to represent the seafood industry in the DelMarVa region that is modeled after the SFA and seeks to preserve a resource and a way of life that he has known and loves for future generations.