People
Loïcka Baille
MIT-WHOI Joint Program Student
Loïcka obtained her BSc in Ocean Engineering from Texas A&M University, and joined the lab in June 2020. Her research focuses on optimizing vessel-based marine mammal detection systems by improving the mechanical design and fusing several sensor modalities.
Johannes Bartl
Uni Erlangen PhD Student
Johannes is taking up again on Emperor penguin tracking work. He aims to automatically detect and track individuals in an emperor penguin huddle to investigate the huddle dynamic and structure.
Isabelle Brandicourt
NEU Coop Student
Isabelle is an electrical engineering major/marine biology minor from Northeastern University. She and her NEU team are working on developing a new ultra low-cost acoustic release as a capstone project.
Annette Bombosch
Guest Investigator
Alejandro Cammareri
Guest Investigator
Alejandro is a vet with a major passion for cetaceans and runs the marybio foundation in Patagonia, Argentina. He is responsible for one of our main field sites. His core interest are in Conservation Biology and understanding the effects of whale watching on animal stress and fitness to allow for proper regulation of this growing industry in South America.
Aymeric Houstin
Postdoc
Aymeric is the worlds best emperor penguin handler:) During his postdoc at WHOI he will venture new grounds and study the the applicability of our whale detection systems to conduct automatic line transect distance sampling surveys for North Atlantic right whales
Idil Ilgaz Kaya
Guest Student
İdil is a guest student from Middle East Technical University. She is working on underwater passive acoustic localization of Bowhead whale calls using relative arrival times.
Mark Goldwater
MIT-WHOI Joint Program Student (co-advised with Julien Bonnel)
Mark earned his B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. He has enjoyed working in communications systems, signal processing, and machine learning applications. His current research is focused on applying machine learning to augment the abilities of acoustic sensors.
Kylie Owen
Guest Investigator
Kylie is a Humpback foraging ecologist specialist. She knows everything about Humpback whales and how they feed. Together we developed the WHALEFOOD program where we look into understanding how baleen whales detect and localize their Prey. Kylie got her PhD in Australia and if not at WHOI, she is based in Sweden.
Sebastian Richter
Postdoc
Sebastian is a long-lasting member of our group and has been with our group for almost a Decade and started designing our observatories while he was still an undergraduate student. His main interests are to get things (observatories) going and make them last through tough weather. He has been involved in all photography based studies that are ongoing in our group.
Lauren Stanley
Engineering Assistant III
Lauren has a background in data acquisition/visualization, additive manufacturing, and mechatronics. She is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Robotics Engineering at WPI. Prior to WHOI, she worked as an R&D engineer at Formlabs, where she oversaw print process validation studies and spent a summer building 3D printers in China. Lauren grew up in Seattle and enjoyed leading trail crews for the Youth Corps, giving her a strong appreciation for conservation efforts around the world.
Dylan Titmuss
Research Assistant II
Dev Vaibhav
Northeastern University Coop Student
Dev is a coop student coming to WHOI from Northeastern University. His research interests are in robotics, and so Dev will support our work on the ECHO Penguin Robot.
Alexander Winterl
PhD Candidate
Alexander studies how to best study Emperor Penguins. His research focuses on using time-lapse imagery of emperor penguins to determine the colonies health and foraging success. This includes teaching machines how to count tens of thousands of penguins as well as understanding the collective behavior of emperor penguins in detail, so we can harvest the information contained in its dynamics to derive larger scale ecological answers.
Daniel P. Zitterbart (PI)
Associate Scientist
I am interested understanding collective animal behavior in the most remote regions of our planet. Our Lab generally takes a holistic approach from developing the sensor we work with, to the derivation of mathematical models which explain group behavior. A big part of our work consists of instrument development, which is usually remotely operated or autonomous and enables us to observe animal behavior in the wild for extended periods of time.
Contact: dpz@whoi.edu
Collaborators
No science is fun alone, so we have very good friends and collaborators around the world.
Celine Le Bohec, CNRS Strasbourg & CSM Monaco
Joe Warren, Stony Brook University
Alumni
Hadley Clark
Research Assistant
Hadley is studying the dynamic distribution of the bowhead whale population in the Beaufort Sea by analyzing passive acoustic monitoring data to create a density map of the whales' spatial diversity. The shape and topography of the Beaufort Shelf makes this acoustic analysis unique.
Hadley moved on to graduate school at SIO, good luck Hadley!
Adam Smyth
Research Associate
Adam earned both a B.S. in Earth Sciences and a M.S. in Oceanography from the University of New Hampshire. Prior to WHOI, Adam worked as a contractor for NOAA's Satellite Analysis Branch where he provided satellite-based analyses for marine oil spills. His core interests involve ocean biogeochemistry and remote sensing.
Yumeng Melody Cao
PhD student
Mel is a MIT-EECS PhD Student who is currently working in our lab on machine learning methods to create automated ethograms from walking penguins.
Lana Lenourry
Guest Student
Lana is a currently a guest student at WHOI and came from ENS Paris-Saclay. Lana is preparing for a multi-month expedition (Antarctique 2.0°C) to the Antarctic peninsula where she will study the impact of climate change and sea level rise on penguin breeding sites.
Joaquim Oller
Research Engineer
Joaquim develops hard and software as necessary for our lab. Joaquim has a background in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and enjoys hardware now low power programming.
Anthony Lindley
Guest Student
Anthony is a guest student from Southampton University. During his tenure at WHOI, Anthony will work on Emperor penguin navigation within Emperor penguin colonies.
MEL ST. CYR
Engineering Assistant
Mel is an electrical engineering major from Northeastern University. She is working on ECHO, our autonomous penguin robot to roam around the colony and scan RFID tagged Emperor Penguins.
Emily Wong
Summer Student Fellow 2021
Emily joined the lab as Summer Student Fellow in 2021. She is a mechanical engineering major from Stanford University and working on machine learning methods to classify breeding cycle events in different penguin species