Seminars

Seminar abstract:

About the speaker:

Ryan Walter received his B.S. degree from Cornell University, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University in Environmental Engineering. His research interests are in the field of environmental fluid mechanics, and involve the application of fluid mechanics principles to the study of flow and transport processes in the environment. His research focuses on the interdisciplinary nature of environmental fluid mechanics, specifically how various physical processes affect ecosystem health and biological processes in coastal systems. His current research projects include investigating shallow water internal wave dynamics, circulation and transport processes in upwelling bays, nearshore dissolved oxygen dynamics, scenarios for offshore wind energy along the California coast, and the role that estuarine hydrodynamics play in shaping seagrass systems in a local estuary. He also runs an ocean observing network along the Central California Coast.

About the speaker:

Casey Dunn mostly grew up in rural northern California. He did his undergraduate studies at Stanford, his graduate studies at Yale, and a postdoc at the University of Hawaii. He then was on the faculty at Brown for 10 years, and has been back at Yale since. He is an evolutionary biologist with a special interest in the gelatinous zooplankton of the open ocean. His work integrates natural history, phylogenetics, and genomics.

About the speaker:

Dr. DeVogelaere oversees the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary's Research Program. This includes facilitating collaboration among over 20 research institutions in the region, providing technical information to decision makers and the Sanctuary staff, and initiating research on resource management issues. Dr. DeVogelaere is also leading the Sanctuary Integrated Monitoring Network (SIMoN), a critical program that assesses how populations of marine organisms and habitats are changing through time.  He has been directly involved in a wide variety of research projects, ranging in habitats from the deep-sea to estuaries. His past work experience includes being an elected official as Commissioner for the Moss Landing Harbor District and Research Coordinator for the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Biology from the University of California, Berkeley, a Master of Science in Marine Science from Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, and a Doctorate in Biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

About the speaker:

Dr. Leif N. Thomas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Earth System Science at Stanford University. Thomas received a PhD in Physical Oceanography from the University of Washington, and was an Assistant Scientist at WHOI before joining the faculty at Stanford.  His research aims to understand the dynamics of submesoscale currents, highly energetic, time-variable flows that are associated with ocean fronts and eddies. These flows are ubiquitous in the upper ocean and strongly shape how water is exchanged between the sea surface and the deep, with implications for marine life, the dispersal of tracers, and the carbon and energy budgets of the ocean. Thomas’ research group at Stanford uses theory, computer modeling, and field observations to characterize the complex physics of submesoscale currents and assess their global-scale impacts on the ocean and climate.

About the speaker:

Katy Seto is an Assistant Professor in the Environmental Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research lies at the intersection of political ecology, governance theory, and sustainability science, and investigates the equity, sustainability, and governance of marine and coastal systems. Currently, her research focuses on ecology and governance of marine systems, seafood within local and global food systems, and issues of maritime security and globalization.

About the speaker:

Dr. Lesley Thorne is an Assistant Professor in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University. Born and raised in Kingston, Ontario in Canada, Lesley received a BSc (Honours) at the University of Guelph and a PhD from Duke University in North Carolina. She has worked in a wide range of marine systems, including the Bay of Fundy, the South Atlantic Bight, the Sargasso Sea, the western Antarctic Peninsula, and the Main and Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Lesley is broadly interested in ecological questions in coastal and pelagic systems, and much of her research focuses on understanding links between environmental variability, foraging behavior and population processes, and on elucidating biophysical interactions driving the habitat use and foraging ecology of different marine predators.

Mussels are well-known ecosystem engineers, often dominating temperate wave-swept shores worldwide.  They are also important aquaculture species and a “biofouling” nuisance to many maritime industries. Disturbance to mussel populations, such as dislodgment due to increased flow forces and/or weakened attachment, therefore has important ecological and economic ramifications.  Mussels attach securely to hard substrates such as rock, aquaculture rope and ship hulls by molding individual collagen-like tethers called byssal threads.  This seminar will describe some of our controlled laboratory experiments on the effects of ocean acidification (OA), ocean warming (OW) and hypoxia on byssal thread strength, as well as our field observations of farmed mussel populations. Our ecomechanical framework provides a valuable tool for predicting the responses of mussels, and their dependent coastal communities, to current and future climate scenarios.

About the speaker:

Emily Carrington is Professor of Biology at the University of Washington, where she leads a marine biomechanics research group based in Seattle and the Friday Harbor Laboratories in the San Juan Islands.  She grew up in Michigan and North Carolina, where she developed a fascination with industrial assembly lines and coastal waves and currents. Her research on the mechanical design of marine invertebrates and macroalgae, especially those that thrive in the wave-swept rocky shores began on the shores of Monterey Bay. Her work draws upon the fields of engineering, biology and oceanography to develop a mechanistic understanding of how coastal organisms will fare in changing ocean climates.

About the speaker:

Dr. Carl Lamborg is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the Ocean Sciences Department. Prior to working at UCSC, Carl spent 11 years working at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, first as a Post-doctoral Scholar and later as an Associate Scientist without tenure. Carl received a Ph.D. in Oceanography from the University of Connecticut in 2003, a MS in Environmental Chemistry from University of Michigan, and a BA in Chemistry from Oberlin College.

About the speaker:

Dr. William J. Sydeman is a veteran marine ecologist with expertise in eastern boundary current - upwelling, and other temperate-subarctic ecosystems of the North Pacific.  Bill conducts interdisciplinary research focusing on marine climate impacts on plankton (krill), forage fish, and predators (seabirds).  His expertise includes changes in ocean temperature and winds, population biology of krill and forage fish, seabird ecology and conservation, ecosystem-based fisheries management, and ecological indicators.  He has published about 200 papers in the primary literature, and serves on various advisory panels including as current co-chair of California’s Ocean Protection Council – Science Advisory Team.  Bill lives and works in Petaluma in northern California.  Bill’s presentation will be based on a recent paper published in Science in May 2021 entitled “Hemispheric Asymmetry in Ocean Change and the Productivity of Ecosystem Sentinels” in which he and a large group of international colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of changes in seabird breeding success across the globe and compared responses across seabird trophic levels and foraging behavior.