People

Loicka Baille
PhD Candidate (WHOI-MIT Joint Program) 2020 -
Loicka obtained her BSc in Ocean Engineering from Texas A&M, and joined the lab in June 2020. Her research is centered around how to optimize vessel based marine mammal detection by fusing several sensor modalities.

Annette Bombosch
Guest Investigator

Alejandro Cammareri
Guest Investigator
Alejandro is a veterinarian 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. At WHOI, Ale works on analysis of the SAMBAY dataset for marine mammal distribution estimation in Baja San Antonio.

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.

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 since 2018
PhD Student 2012 - 2018
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.

Alexander Winterl
PhD Candidate 2017 -
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)
I am interested understanding collective animal behavior in the most remote regions of our planet. Group organization is at the heart of my research questions. 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. See here for my CV
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 Strassbourg
Joe Warren, Stony Brook University