Mr. Boland is a biological oceanographer in the Environmental Sciences Division at headquarters of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management in Herndon, Virginia. He is the benthic communities lead for BOEMRE studies in all national regions including Pacific, Atlantic, Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. He is also the individual project lead on several deepwater studies involving deepwater corals and chemosynthetic communities in the Gulf of Mexico and deepwater canyons in the Atlantic. He began his research career at Texas A&M University Department of Oceanography in 1974 with Dr. Tom Bright and participated in the field sampling and analysis of video records taken by manned submersible at numerous topographic features on the Gulf of Mexico continental shelf. Before moving to BOEM headquarters, he worked in the (then) Minerals Management Service (MMS) Gulf of Mexico Region between 1998 and 2009 responsible for both fisheries and deepwater community subject areas in National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) documents as well as managing 10-12 related contracted studies at any one time. Prior to his positions with MMS, he served as a principal investigator on numerous large Gulf of Mexico studies with LGL Ecological Research Associates in Bryan Texas between 1978 and 1988 including offshore platform studies, deep-sea biology and coral reef monitoring projects. He also worked ten years with Dr. Gil Rowe at Texas A&M University’s Department of Oceanography between 1988 and 1998 involving a variety of benthic ecology studies worldwide including the development and operation of a deep-sea benthic lander. He was a very active scientific diver until leaving the Gulf Region logging 2,300 dives including under ice in the Beaufort Sea, mixed gas umbilical dives from a bell at the Flower Garden Banks, over 657 dives on 81 different offshore Gulf platforms and 652 dives in the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary as of 1-2008. He has also made numerous submersible dives including the vehicles Johnson Sea Link I and II, Nekton Gamma and the TAMU Diaphus. As the science observer in the JSL sphere the first observed chemosynthetic communities in the northern Gulf of Mexico was made on September 27, 1986 later to be known as Bush Hill.

  Please note that only publications relevant to mesophotic reefs are indexed.

	Mesophotic coral ecosystems in the Hawaiian Archipelago | article Rooney J, Donham E, Montgomery A, Spalding H, Parrish F, Boland R, Fenner D, Gove J, Vetter O (2010) Coral Reefs 29:361-367
	A description of fish assemblages in the black coral beds off Lahaina, Maui, Hawai'i | article Boland RC, Parrish FA (2005) Pac Sci 59:411-420
	New Records of Commercially Valuable Black Corals (Cnidaria: Antipatharia) from the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands at Mesophotic Depths | article Wagner D, Papastamatiou YP, Kosaki RK, Gleason KA, McFall GB, Boland RC, Pyle RL, Toonen RJ (2011) Pac Sci 65:249-255
	Identifying Suitable Locations for Mesophotic Hard Corals Offshore of Maui, Hawai‘i | article Costa B, Kendall MS, Parrish FA, Rooney J, Boland RC, Chow M, Lecky J, Montgomery A, Spalding H (2015) PLoS ONE 10:e0130285