Meet the DataBytes Team
Kaitlin Noyes
As Director of Education and Community Engagement, Kaitlin designs and implements strategic, public-facing ocean science education programming for BIOS. She works across disciplinary silos to cultivate and maintain relationships with schools, professional associations and non-profit organizations locally and internationally.
As part of BIOS’s local educational mission, Kaitlin directs Ocean Academy, BIOS’s suite of five local education programs, Kaitlin works to connect community assets to the BIOS campus by cultivating authentic relationships. Kaitlin also works with BIOS’s international education partners on course and curriculum development through the Visiting Groups Program, Educator Workshops, and Road Scholar Program.
Dr. Leslie Smith
Leslie is an oceanographer and science communicator. She has spent the last decade focusing on translating ocean science to educational and non-science audiences through both domestic and international programs.
Our Research Collaborators
Dr. Amy Maas
Amy is a comparative physiologist and biological oceanographer whose research addresses fundamental questions about how the environment influences the distribution and biology of marine invertebrates. Based on this understanding she works to identify how climate change will impact biogeochemical cycling.
Her current research projects also include studying pteropod distribution and seasonality at the BATS site, explorations of circadian rhythms and diel vertical migration in open water zooplankton to better understand how environmental changes impact carbon flux, and comparative transcriptomics of multiple plankton species.
Dr. Leocadio Blanco-Bercial
Leo is a zooplankton ecologist who is investigating the zooplankton community at the Bermuda Atlantic Time-Series (BATS) site in the Sargasso Sea.
His research integrates classical morphological analysis with molecular approaches to describe the temporal and vertical distribution of species, while also addressing broader spatial and temporal questions related to zooplankton phylogeny, population genetics and dispersal.
Ruth Curry
Ruth is a physical oceanographer who runs the autonomous underwater glider program (Mid Atlantic Glider Initiative and Collaboration, or MAGIC) and is a Principal Investigator for the NSF-sponsored Oleander Project.
Her research focuses on ocean salinity distributions, shifts in the global fresh water balance, and how these affect the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC). Her field programs utilize autonomous gliders and sensors to investigate nutrient and carbon cycling in the Sargasso Sea, and instrumentation installed on the commercial container vessel Oleander to measure ocean currents and temperature between Bermuda and New Jersey on a weekly basis.
Dr. Damian Grundle
Damian is a biogeochemical oceanographer whose research primarily focuses on marine nitrogen cycling.
His recent work has focused on extreme oxygen minimum zones (e.g., eastern tropical South Pacific and low oxygen eddies in the eastern tropical North Atlantic). He also operates an eddy covariance system on the R/V Atlantic Explorer to directly measure air-sea gas exchange with a goal towards understanding how various biogeochemical and physical processes impact gas fluxes across the air-sea interface.