News

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.

01 June 2019 – SIO 176, Observational Physical Oceanography class, Spring 2019, class cruise! Giddings was invited to join Fiamma Straneo’s SIO 176 cruise aboard the R/V Robert Gordon Sproul. The cruise was intended to give the students a taste for field work and to test out the CTDs that they designed and built during the class! It was a beautiful, calm day out on the water and the students really enjoyed experiencing fieldwork first hand. Two of the student-built CTDs collected data and two remained water tight to depths of 50m!

24 May 2019, Angelica successfully defended her PhD, congratulations to the new Doctor!!!

Come learn about the CSIDE project and some of Sarah and the lab’s work as it pertains to coastal pollution transport and estuarine/coastal exchange at the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve (TRNERR) speaker series! The talk is Saturday 20 April, 2019 starting at 10am at the TRNERR reserve, for more information please see the TRNERR event information and flyer.