News

14 – 22 November 2019 – We have been preparing for our NOAA NCCOS Coastal Hypoxia Research Program (CHRP) field deployments. This includes gathering oysters from our field sites, attaching biosensors to them, programming hydrodynamic instruments, and preparing moorings. Prior test deployments with an undergraduate research team were highlighted here. Now we are collaborating with Dr. Luke Miller and MS student Gabby Kalbach from SDSU using their sensor packages. This work was recently featured by KPBS!

06 November 2019 – We have a new Dr! Dr. Madeleine Harvey defended her dissertation on November 6th and submitted all paperwork at the end of November so that she is now officially a Dr. Congratulations Maddie!!! Amazing work pulling together a truly unique set of estuarine measurements and a beautifully done presentation. Maddie will be sticking around the lab for another couple months after which she will be headed off to Rhode Island where she will be starting at NUWC.

06 September 2019 – Sarah presented at the Flood Management Association (FMA) annual conference field tour of the Tijuana Estuary. Topics included estuarine flooding risk from both upstream and the ocean and the interactions with estuarine health and coastal water pollution.

22 July 22 – 23 August 2019 – New PhD student Duncan Wheeler attended the Estuarine and Coastal Fluid Dynamics course this summer at UW’s Friday Harbor Laboratories. This 5-week intensive course is led by Dr. Parker MacCready (UW) and Dr. Rocky Geyer (WHOI) and is a crash course in estuarine and coastal dynamics including not only lectures but also hands-on field work and group projects. Sarah was fortunate to be invited as a guest lecturer during the last week of the course (19-23 August). She presented lectures on surfzone dynamics and the interaction of waves within estuaries and with estuarine outflows. She lucked out attending the last week as she got to see the impressive final student presentations – full field experiments and analysis in 5 weeks!!

07 August, 2019 – presentation at the Tijuana Estuary Research Symposium. We presented our NOAA NCCOS CHRP project results to date at this interdisciplinary research symposium hosted by the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve (TRNERR). Scientists, engineers, and managers shared related projects and we discussed management needs and triggers for ecological and estuarine health.

06 August 2019 – NOAA NCCOS Coastal Hypoxia Research Program (CHRP) program manager Kimberly Puglise met with our team to discuss our project and visited one of our two field sites, Los Peñasquitos Lagoon. The project is investigating the causes and consequences of hypoxic events in low-inflow estuaries using an interdisciplinary physical-biological approach incorporating both historical and conducting new field observations.

16 – 21 June 2019, Gordon Research Conference (GRC) on Coastal Ocean Dynamics. Isa, Angelica, Alma, and Sarah all attended the 2019 GRC on Coastal Ocean Dynamics. It was an excellent conference filled with great talks and lively science discussions. Looking forward to another one in 2 years!

Angelica defended her dissertation on 24 May 2019 and started working as a postdoctoral Researcher with the Center for Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation at SIO in June. On 08 June 2019 we had a lab party for Angelica and on 15 June 2019, Sarah proudly hooded Angelica at the UCSD Graduate Commencement ceremony.

Angelica and Sarah patiently awaiting SIO and Angelica to be called up to the stage!

12 June 2019 Alex Horner-Devine and Jim Thomson’s (UW) graduate student Sam Kastner defended his general exam, he is making great progress towards defending his dissertation! To followup this event, we held a mini symposium at UW on wave-plume interactions on 13 June 2019. Angelica joined us remotely. It was an incredibly fruitful day filled with in-depth discussions about wave-plume interactions, relevant parameter space, measurement and modeling techniques, and more.

Congratulations to Isabella Arzeno! Isa was awarded the prestigious Ford Foundation Dissertation Year Fellowship. Ford Foundation Fellowship programs (administered through the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, & Medicine) aim to increase the diversity of the US college and university faculties by “increasing their ethnic and racial diversity, maximize the educational benefits of diversity, and increase the number of professors who can and will use diversity as a resource for enriching the education of all students”. See here for a Ford Foundation 2019 Fellows press release.