People
Loicka Baille
WHOI-MIT Joint Program Student
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
Isabelle Brandicourt
Engineering Assistant
Isabelle is an electrical engineering major/marine biology minor from Northeastern University. She is working on real-time VHF tracking of emperor penguins on their commute between the ocean and the breeding colony.
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.
Yumeng Melody Cao
Guest 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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