people

Duncan Wheeler is a postdoc in the Department of Earth & Climate Sciences at Tufts University using observations from Greenland and Alaska to study ocean-glacier interactions. Duncan received his PhD in physical oceanography from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, funded by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in April 2024. Duncan is interested in interdisciplinary research that bridges the social and physical sciences to identify how fundamental physical research can be done in a way that most effectively benefits society. For his thesis, first he examined the ways in which large infragravity frequency waves can impact shallow estuaries, mainly through turbulent mixing and its resulting effects on salinity, temperature, and oxygen. Second, he studied cultural conflicts that arise in academia and how they affect researchers through interviews asking academics about various expectations. Previously Duncan received a Bachelor of Science in Physics from MIT, where he worked on optics research with applications to photovoltaics.

Elizabeth Brasseale is currently a Postdoctoral researcher in the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs at the University of Washington using oceanography to interpret eDNA samples for biomonitoring cetaceans. She was a postdoctoral scholar in the Giddings lab from September 2020-December 2022 where she modeled water quality as a function of pollutant decay and sinking using regional ocean models as part of the U.S. Coastal Research Program. Previously, Elizabeth studied estuarine-shelf interactions and larval transport of marine invasive species in the Pacific northwest during her doctoral studies at the University of Washington, advised by Parker MacCready.

Dr. Lemagie is currently a Research Physical Scientist at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) studying ocean dynamics and the impacts on marine ecosystems in the North Pacific Ocean, Bering Sea, and U.S. Arctic. She was a postdoctoral scholar at SIO in the Giddings lab from December 2020 - May 2021 when she worked on examining ocean/estuarine exchange across multiple estuaries. She received her PhD in Physical Oceanography at Oregon State University in 2018 and worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution before joining the Giddings lab group. Emily’s research investigates the physical and biological linkages and transport pathways in both estuarine and coastal environments on immediate to climatic timescales. She has focused on estuarine residence time, river plume dynamics, and across-shelf exchange in order to determine the immediate and long-term effects of event to climate-scale changes on coastal ecosystems.

Alma Carolina Castillo Trujillo currently is the head of modeling at atdepth. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography from September 2018 - February 2021 working with Giddings and Pawlak using numerical models and observations as part of the SLOMO project to study the circulation around the Seychelles Islands. She received a Bachelor of Science in Oceanography from UABC in Ensenada, México and a Masters and PhD in Physical Oceanography, both from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She has participated in several educational programs for the Hawaiian and Mexican communities and would like to establish similar outreach in Tijuana and San Diego.

Maddie is an Oceanographer at Naval Undersea Warfare Center Newport. She completed her PhD in the Giddings lab in November 2019 where she used field observations to better understand coastal and estuarine dynamics. Specifically, she examined how sediment transport in the surf zone and rivers can impact the morphology and closure of the mouth of an estuary and how the mouth morphology affects physical, chemical, and biological processes within the estuary. She received a Bachelor of Science from Brown University in Civil and Environmental Engineering in 2012. As an avid sailor growing up, her love of the ocean developed at a young age and grew into a desire to study ocean and coastal processes in order to work to devise solutions to the problems facing our oceans and estuaries today.

Jack is an assistant professor at Stoney Brook. She worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher with Dr. Giddings and Dr. Feddersen on the CSIDE project. She received her PhD at Rutgers University studying sediment dynamics in the Delaware Estuary and also did a postdoc studying inner-shelf dynamics at OSU.

Adrian was an undergraduate researcher working on building biosensors to be put onto oysters. The sensors measured the oyster shell gape (how far open it is) to see its response to environmental stressors.

Abishek was an undergraduate researcher working on expanding upon the model visualization tool, FlowWeaver, originally developed by Neil Banas.