October 2023

Inside this Issue

Features

• Welcome to our 20th Edition
• From the Chair of the Board,
  Dr. Shelley D. Dionne
• News & Events
• Link Fellows/Interns/Scholars, where are they now?

Meet this Year's Fellowship Recipients

• Energy
• Modeling, Simulation and Training
• Ocean Engineering
• SmithsonianFellows

Link Fellowship Awardees for 2023 - 2024

Ocean Engineering and Instrumentation

FIRST YEAR FELLOWS

Jake holds a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Ocean Engineering from the University of Rhode Island, awarded in 2019 and 2021, respectively. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in Ocean Engineering at the University of Rhode Island. The focus of his research lies in enhancing predictive capabilities regarding the development of harmful cyanobacterial blooms through automated and adaptive sampling. Harmful algal blooms (HABs) present challenges to limnologists and marine ecologists due to limited understanding of their origin, development, and spread in lakes and coastal estuaries. This knowledge gap is attributed to the constraints of spatial and temporal resolution in data collection, alongside the absence of tools for real-time data integration and analysis. Jake's project aims to bridge these gaps by generating high-resolution spatial and temporal data in three-dimensional (3D) space using autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) with intelligent adaptive sampling capabilities. Notably, he also plans to adapt a new imaging sensor for bacterial microscopy to mobile ASVs, a novel approach that could significantly contribute to the understanding of HABs.

 

Julio Chavez-Dorado is a PhD student in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle, focusing on Environmental Fluid Mechanics. Prior to pursuing his PhD, he completed his bachelor's degree in Bolivia and received a master's degree from the University of Texas at Austin under a Fulbright Fellowship, both in Civil Engineering. During his undergraduate studies, Julio became interested in fluid mechanics while doing research on small-scale hydroelectric power generation in rural communities. As a Link Foundation fellow, Julio will develop a separation technique of wave and turbulence motions in both the frequency and time domain using dynamic mode decomposition (DMD). DMD is a model reduction technique tailored to recover dominant dynamics from noisy fluid flow data without any prior system knowledge and has been widely used in the fluid dynamics community. The goal is to gain new insights into the near-surface ocean flow that modulates key climate processes, ranging from mixed layer dynamics to air-sea fluxes of heat, gas, and momentum. Modeling and understanding these phenomena require precise quantification of turbulence-induced mixing, which is frequently contaminated by surface waves that inject energy into the flow at frequencies that overlap with turbulent motions. Thus, an accurate separation technique would be valuable not only for mixing estimates but for a host of engineering applications such as wave energy converter control and offshore structure design.

 

Kevin Fletcher is a PhD student in the Mechanical and Aerospace (MAE) Department at the University of Virginia (UVA) studying Aerospace Engineering. He received his Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering from UVA in 2021. While an undergrad, Kevin was involved in research with Professor Eric Loth to optimize the design of a novel floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT) substructure, SpiderFLOAT. This motivated his interest to pursue graduate study and further research into wind energy and FOWT substructure design and modeling. For his future work, with the help of the Link Fellowship, Kevin will investigate and optimize the design of a semi-free connection of the buoyant bodies (can bundles) for a semi-submersible type FOWT substructure. This work will include optimizing the substructure design with OpenFAST and validating the design with water tank experiments using a 3d-printed Froude scaled model of the FOWT. Kevin’s work will provide a better understanding of the tradeoff of adding substructure flexibility in FOWTs

Monika Roznere is a PhD candidate in the Computer Science Department at Dartmouth College. In 2018, she graduated from State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and a minor in Graphic Design. Her passion in computer vision, graphics, robotics, and the underwater realm led her to join Dartmouth’s Reality and Robotics Lab. There with Professor Alberto Quattrini Li, she studies and designs methods to enable affordable Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) to perform large-scale exploration on scenes like shipwrecks, caves, and reefs. With the help of the Link Fellowship, Monika will design a system-based framework to guide AUVs around unknown underwater structures, collect camera imagery, and reconstruct 3D models of the scene in-situ. The 3D scene reconstruction technique is based on a Photometric Stereo (PS) solver that utilizes a camera-and-structured-light setup – such that the AUV will observe the visual changes in the scene’s illumination depending on the different lighting configurations that the AUV enables. The exploration of the scene will be achieved through a next-best-view planner, where the AUV will choose viewpoints predicted to improve the 3D model’s accuracy, specifically prioritizing regions where the PS error was high. Monika’s work will be extendable to other domains, like ground and aerial, while helping advance active perception and information path planning. Overall, she envisions that her work will further democratize the use of robots by lowering the cost and enabling new applications in challenging fieldwork.

 

Scott is a PhD student in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program in Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science and Engineering (MIT-WHOI Joint Program) studying isotopte geochemistry. He previously earned his Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry from Williams College in 2014, his Master of Arts in Earth and Planetary Science from Harvard University in 2017, and his Master of Science in Law in Environmental Law from the University of Maryland’s Francis King Carey School of Law in 2020. Scott additionally worked at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center for four years as a member of the Curiosity Rover science team, the manager of the stable isotope facilities in the Planetary Environments Laboratory group, and a faculty member at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. In his doctoral work in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program, Scott has developed a prototype isotope ratio laser spectrometer (IRLS) for making rapid high-precision clumped isotope measurements for paleoceanographic research. With the assistance of the Link Fellowship, Scott aims to incorporate novel hollow core fiber (HCF) technology into his prototype instrument. Incorporating this HCF technology into the IRLS will reduce sample size requirements by three orders of magnitude, enabling a massive increase in temporal resolution for clumped isotope measurements (e.g., measuring single foraminifera or annual coral growth layers). Additionally, incorporating HCF technology would move the project closer to the development of a compact field-based instrument. Such a field instrument would enable measurement of isotope ratios (particularly δ¹³C), in situ, improving our ability to understand sources, sinks, and fluxes of carbon in the ocean. Improving the current IRLS system through the incorporation of HCF technology will open several novel avenues of oceanographic research, and sharing this work with the broader community will greatly expand our capacity to utilize isotope measurements to study Earth’s ocean.

 

SECOND YEAR FELLOWS

Devon is a fourth year PhD student at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the multiscale ocean dynamics (MOD) lab. He completed an undergraduate degree in physics at UC San Diego in 2017, and worked for several years at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute before returning to San Diego and Scripps to pursue a PhD in applied ocean science. Devon's project focuses on developing software, algorithms, and deployment techniques for a new towed phased array Doppler sonar (TPADS) built by the MOD lab with funding from the office of naval research. TPADS uses a phased array approach to image ocean velocities in three dimensions, giving us unique insight into the physics of small scale ocean processes with complex three dimensional structures that cannot be measured with traditional oceanographic instrumentation. These processes drive vertical transport of heat, momentum, and nutrients; their cumulative effect is visible in global climate and global patterns of ocean productivity.

 

Amy is a PhD student in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Joint Program in the Aeronautics and Astronautics department at MIT and the Applied Ocean Science and Engineering department at WHOI. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Robotics Engineering from Olin College in 2021. While at Olin, her senior capstone project involved developing a virtual reality (VR) interface for pilots of Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) in collaboration with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). Motivated by the performance and usability improvements that resulted from using the interface, her initial research in grad school focused on using VR to enable scientists without piloting experience to complete underwater sampling tasks using a robotic manipulator arm. With shared autonomy, scientists could collect samples without being physically present onboard the ship since delegating low-level control to the autonomous system reduced the data bandwidth required for operations. With the support of the Link Foundation, her future work will focus on switching from virtual to augmented reality to further improve the system’s usability, and using sonar data to aid manipulation and improve the system’s perception capabilities. These improvements will enable scientists without piloting experience to complete more complex sampling tasks despite environmental challenges such as turbid conditions, which can help democratize access to deep-sea research.

 

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If you would like to find out more about our Link Foundation Ocean Engineering and Instrumentation Fellows and projects that have been funded in the field of Ocean Engineering and Instrumentation by the Link Foundation, please visit the Link Ocean Engineering and Instrumentation webpage at http://www.linkoe.org/.