People
Meet the WHOI Argo leadership.
For a full list of WHOI Argo team members, please visit the Float Group website.
Dr. Steven Jayne
Senior Scientist
Dr. Jayne’s research interests include understanding and modeling the ocean’s dynamics and its role in the Earth’s climate; collecting and synthesizing the diverse set of global ocean observations to map and understand the ocean’s general circulation; studying the special role of western boundary currents in the general circulation and eddy-mean flow interactions within them; investigating air-sea interaction in tropical cyclones; and improving physical parameterizations in ocean circulation models.
Contact: sjayne@whoi.edu
Dr. Susan Wijffels
Senior Scientist
Susan aims to quantify and understand the role of the ocean in climate, key aspects of the large-scale ocean circulation and global ocean change. She also is recognised for her contributions to the design, implementation and exploitation of the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS). Susan received a B.Sc. Hons (First Class) from the Flinders University of South Australia, in 1986, and a PhD in 1993 from the MIT/WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography and Oceanographic Engineering. She was with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) Marine Laboratory in Australia from 1994, becoming a principle senior researcher, before joining WHOI in July 2017.
Susan’s work at WHOI focuses on her long term interests in the variability of the Indonesian Throughflow and its role in climate, the global Argo project and the evolution of its design (she is co-chair of the International Argo Steering Team), quantifying global ocean change over the past 50 years, including the anatomy and drivers of ocean warming, how changes in the earth’s hydrological cycle are expressed in large scale changes to the ocean salinity field and if and how climate models exhibit these behaviours.
Contact: swijffels@whoi.edu
Dr. Pelle Robbins
Research Specialist
Dr. Robbins has been coordinating the operations of the WHOI Argo effort for many years, as well as overseeing the quality control of the project's data stream. She has a background in large-scale ocean and biogeochemical processes.
Contact: probbins@whoi.edu
Dr. Breck Owens
Emeritus Research Scholar
Dr. Owens is the Director of the international Argo program. His research focuses on the description of the general circulation and eddy variability in the world’s oceans; sea ice, ocean- atmosphere coupling dynamics; development of float technology and autonomous vehicles for ocean monitoring.
Contact: bowens@whoi.edu
Dr. David Nicholson
Associate Scientist
Dr. Nicholson's research uses autonomous platforms such as floats and gliders as well as numerical models to understand the interplay of physics and biology in the global cycling of carbon, oxygen and other elements. He has extensive experience studying dissolved gas dynamics in the ocean, ranging from greenhouse gas fluxes, to stable oxygen isotopic productivity tracers to passive noble gas tracers of air-sea exchange processes.
Contact: dnicholson@whoi.edu