Stuart M. Frank is the founder and director of the Scrimshaw Forensics^® Laboratory, and Editor of the triannual journal Scrimshaw Observer.  A native of New York City, he holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University, two postgraduate diplomas from the Munson Institute of Maritime Studies (University of Connecticut), master’s degrees from Yale and Brown Universities, and a Ph.D. from Brown.  He is an elected Fellow of the Massa­chusetts Historical Society, a Research Fellow of the Nantucket Historical Association, was previously Research Associate at Mystic Seaport, Executive Director of the Kendall Whaling Museum, and Senior Curator of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.  He has been an advisor and consultant to museums in the USA, Canada, Europe, Australia, and Japan, and has taught undergraduates and postgraduate students at Brown, MIT, and both the Williams College Program in Maritime Studies and the Munson Institute of Maritime Studies at Mystic Seaport.  In 1980 he founded the annual Sea Music Festival and Symposium at Mystic Seaport.  His wife is maritime and Northwest Coast historian and novelist Dr. Mary Malloy, with whom he has performed concerts of sea music and cowboy songs on four continents since 1989.  They appear together on vinyl, tapes, and CDs produced by Smithsonian / Folkways and Grey Horse Records (Lubbock, Texas), and in 2014 were inducted into the Old Time Country Music Hall of Fame of the National Traditional Country Music Association.