The Team

Tom DeCarlo is a graduate student in the Joint Program in Oceanography at MIT / Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Anne Cohen's lab. Tom is interested in how coral growth and bioerosion are affected by seawater properties including temperature, nutrients, and pH. In addition, Tom develops geochemical tools to use the chemistry preserved in coral skeletons to better understand how corals have responded to environmental change in the past.

Kristen Davis is an Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. She is interested in understanding how physical processes (winds, waves, tides, currents, etc.) shape the environment in which corals grow. Kristen has been hoping to measure the internal waves shoaling on Dongsha Atoll since she was a graduate student and is very excited about the data we will collect using the new Distributed Temperature Sensing (DTS) instrument.

Austin Hall is a Master's student in the Water Resource Engineering Program at Oregon State University. Austin's research focuses on using Distributed Temperature Sensing (DTS) to evaluate restoration efforts for the John Day River in Oregon and to calibrate a predictive model of the stream. On Dongsha, Austin's expertise with DTS will be critical for tracking internal waves along the reef.

Katie Shamberger is an Assistant Professor of Oceanography at Texas A&M University. Katie's research focuses on the ocean carbon cycle, its alteration by anthropogenic ocean acidification, and the impacts of ocean acidification on calcifying organisms and ecosystems. She is particularly interested in coastal ocean-carbon cycling, especially within coral reef systems. She has worked on coral reefs in the Caribbean, Hawaii, American Samoa, Palau, and the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.

Pat Lohmann is Scientist Emeritus at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Pat is the lead SCUBA diver for our expedition to Dongsha.

Aryan Safaie is a graduate student in Professor Kristen Davis's Lab at UC Irvine. He is currently conducting a synthetic study using in situ temperature data on coral reefs to investigate the relationship between high frequency temperature variability and coral acclimation to bleaching. Aryan is excited to explore data acquired from this field outing for modeling the physical drivers of temperature variation, such as winds, waves, and currents.