Seminars

Dr. Ludka is a coastal scientist with a background that spans physics, oceanography, geology, data science and engineering. They are interested in how coastal physical processes interact with environmental management and ecological functioning, on time scales of storms to decades. Her team uses fieldwork, data analysis and modeling to help build more resilient coasts. Dr. Ludka has a B.S. in Physics from James Madison University and a Ph.D. in Physical Oceanography from Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She has held postdoctoral positions at the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics at Scripps and in the Coastal Engineering Department at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. They also were a California Sea Grant fellow at the California Coastal Commission. Now she is an assistant professor in the Geology Department at San Jose State.

Randie studies trace metal biogeochemistry in seawater, with a focus on how organic compounds impact their global cycling. Her research has taken her on many research cruises, ranging from the tropics to the poles. She did her PhD at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, followed by her postdoc at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. She is now an Assistant Professor in the School of Oceanography at the University of Washington. In her free time she is an avid surfer, loves outdoor activities of any kind, and reading.

Dr. Michelle Jungbluth is currently a Researcher at the San Francisco State University's Estuary and Ocean Science Center. She has a Bachelor's Degree in Biology from the University of Wisconsin Madison, and a M.S. and Ph.D. in Oceanography from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. After completing her Ph.D. she began exploring the complexities of food webs and wetland ecology in the San Francisco Estuary in the lab of Dr. Wim Kimmerer and continues there to this day.She is an ecologist, naturalist, oceanographer and marine biologist interested in the phenomena occurring at the base of aquatic food webs. In her career as a scientist she has focused on studies involving mainly zooplankton - the animals that "drift" in the sea. But they aren't just passive particles, they have unique behaviors that make them very interesting and important members of ecosystems. Her technical expertise includes characterizing life in marine and estuarine ecosystems through DNA barcoding, quantitative PCR-based studies of animal life history and food web connections, and next-generation DNA sequencing. She has also dabbled in DNA barcoding of deep-sea larval invertebrates, which is a location where we know almost nothing about organism diversity and even less about larval ecology.