Featured Scientists

Senior Scientist,  Monterey Bay Aquarium Research InstituteFollowing Her Passion -- A Really Sound DecisionA little girl from Connecticut takes a trip to Sea World. She is captivated by the killer whales and dolphins. Especially the sounds they make and its role in marine life survival.  From that point on, Kelly knew she would make a career out of the sounds in the ocean. As a fourth grader, Kelly wasn’t exactly sure how she would do this-- but, boy oh boy, she figured it out.

Behind Every Great Scientist is a Teacher with a Strong MessageHow does a kid from Missouri become an award-winning scientist who specializes in animals living in the bottom of the ocean? “It wasn’t until I was in community college that I was jolted into actually applying myself. I had a teacher who told me I ‘made him sick’ because I got decent grades with such little effort”, chuckled Jim. “I mean, he had a point. I was basically surfing and goofing off.”Jim applied himself all the way to his PhD from Scripps Institute of Oceanography and today instills a natural curiosity about the ocean with his engaging presence.

Imagine a 13-year old kid riding the bus with his Scuba gear. That was Steve Haddock, who grew up in Southern California. Exploring tidepools, the beach, and the ocean was Steve's favorite thing. Bored with Engineering college Steve delved into biology classes which was a 'winning combination' for researching the deep sea. Steve’s advisors, who studied bioluminescence and the deep sea, opened the door for him to follow his passion as a marine scientist. The light Steve sheds on bioluminescence of the deep sea is impressive, indeed.

Dr. Micheli is a marine ecologist and conservation biologist. Fio, as she is known to students and colleagues, is Italian. Her career path wasn’t a straight line. At college in Florence she studied animal behavior, but after graduating, she took a job collecting intertidal animals for a nature documentary. Fio loved working in the rocky intertidal. This project launched her into marine science. She received her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina and then went to the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, in Santa Barbara, for a post doc. She never went back to live in Italy.

Going Places in the Deep Sea! Through marine technology Bruce Robison takes us places we never thought we'd go. "After thousands of Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) dives and close to one hundred dives in Human Occupied Vehicle (HOV); whenever friends ask me which platform I prefer, my instinctive response is: I'd much prefer being down there by myself."

Dr. John Pearse has spent a lifetime studying the reproductive biology and ecology of sea stars and sea urchins. His doctoral work involved exploring the biology of marine invertebrates in the Antarctic, where he overwintered in 1961 then returned with his own students repeatedly in the 1980s. They found that the abundant and ecologically important Antarctic cushion star spawns in mid-winter to produce long-lived pelagic larvae that feed on bacteria and phytoplankton in the summer. Dr. Pearse has also conducted research in the Red Sea and tropical Pacific.

Dr. Crissy Huffard’s broad research interests are to understand how marine animals live their daily lives to survive and reproduce in changing environments. She has worked primarily with cephalopods, doing her Ph.D. research on octopus behavior. Passionate about the ocean, Dr. Huffard worked for several years in marine conservation with Conservation International Indonesia, and as a consultant with the World Wildlife Fund in Washington DCCurrently Dr. Huffard works with Dr. Ken Smith at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute where the lab aims to understand how ecosystems at abyssal depths (on the sea floor 2.5 miles down) change with the amount of food input. Animals at these depths rely entirely on marine snow – organic particles falling from the upper waters of the ocean – for food. That food supply changes any time ocean surface conditions change, such as during El Nino. In addition to working at MBARI, Dr. Huffard is a Research Associate with the California Academy of Sciences where she collaborates with other researchers to study cephalopod behavior, biology, and evolution.

Dr. Kristi Curry Rogers studies dinosaur evolution and paleobiology, which means she spends a lot of time out in the field looking for dinosaur fossils — from Montana to Madagascar. She is a vertebrate paleontologist and currently Assistant Professor in Geology and Biology at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. When Dr. Curry Rogers is not in the field, she does research on the fossils she discovered in the field. In particular, she looks at the how fast some of the largest dinosaurs grew by looking closely at microscopic slices of fossilized bones (she describes her work in this video on SOL). Her specialty is the sauropod dinosaurs, the largest animals to ever walk on the earth.