New Introductions

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Hi!

My name is Julek. As a biologist by training, I stumbled into the acoustics community about 10 years ago and haven’t left since. Since joining this community, I’ve used fish vessel mounted acoustics to study herring spawning in coastal Maine, used RV mounted acoustics and lowered probes to study Arctic and sub-Arctic pelagic fish, using both single frequency and broadband acoustics, and currently use moored echosounders to understand impacts of atmosphere-ocean processes on under-ice fauna.

As a biological oceanographer at ASL Environmental Sciences (www.aslenv.com), I help researchers design and implement studies using active acoustics, educate students and clients on the operation of instruments and analysis of acoustic data, and work on developing new tech and applications for underwater acoustics.

My research interests include pelagic and mesopelagic fish and zooplankton, high latitude coastal and fjord oceanography, sustainable fisheries, and more recently autonomous monitoring systems, including edge processing and real-time analytics.

I currently live in coastal British Columbia, Canada and am a ‘researcher-in residence’ at the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre (https://bamfieldmsc.com/).

For inquiries related to ASL’s Acoustic Zooplankton Fish Profiler (and new line of products) please get in touch at jchawarski @ aslenv.com, or send a DM.

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@jchawarski : Welcome! Excited that you’re here! :smiley:

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Hi,
I’m a prof at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

I’m interested in any and all topics in acoustical oceanography, noise, underwater sound propagation, and remote sensing with active and passive acoustics. I haven’t been involved in fisheries stuff, but always a bit curious. My infrequently updated website: https://noise.phys.ocean.dal.ca/ has some more details on the exact work that I’ve been doing.

@jchawarski My dad was a co-owner/operator of the Lady Rose and Francis Barkley so have so many fond memories of riding out to Bamfield and the Broken group! It is such a magical place!

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Hi

I’m a PhD student at APL, University of Washington. I currently study vector acoustic propagation in shallow waveguides but have also worked on soundscapes and hydrophone design and calibration.

I’m excited to have this discourse up. I currently update both the AO and UW TC websites, so I’ll make sure to add a link there so people can find it.

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(This is indeed better as a thread, so moving my other post here!)

Hi! Wu-Jung Lee here!

I was fascinated by the ocean even since I stepped on a small boat for a whale watching interpreter training in college (and found out about seasickness…), and luckily realized at some point that acoustics could just be that perfect combination that I can continue to work with animals and signals simultaneously.

My research interests span acoustical oceanography and animal echolocation, and I am always curious about how we can better understand echoes – whether induced by echosounders or by echolocating toothed whales and bats. I also enjoy developing new analytical methods and open-source software in acoustics (check out the Echostack packages!).

I am very passionate about broadening access of knowledge and technology in ocean acoustics, data science, and related fields, and have been very fortunate to have great colleagues to build programs together (check out OceanHackWeek and the Bridge to Ocean Acoustics and Technology (BOAT) program!).

I am currently a scientist at the Applied Physics Lab, University of Washington in Seattle, USA, leading a small research group–the Echospace. Feel free to shoot me an email or DM for a chat!

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@DavidBarclay What a small world! We’re all eagerly waiting for our Lady to come out of refit! She’s been in dry dock for two months.

Really enjoyed checking out the sound library on your website.

Cheers,
Julek

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Howdy!

My name is Brandyn Lucca and I am currently a postdoc working with @leewujung and folks in the Echospace group at the Applied Physics Lab, University of Washington - Seattle.

My research background has been primarily in acoustical and biological oceanography with projects ranging from quantifying biological hotspots throughout a broad continental shelf ecosystem to validating target strength models of various meso- and bathypelagic organisms. I am particularly interested in how naturally occurring variability and uncertainty in target strength model parameterization propagates into population estimate uncertainties.

I am currently working on developing the Echopop Python software package for converting acoustic and biological trawl data into population estimates and inverting other biologically meaningful parameters that can help inform stock assessments and ecosystem-based management strategies. I am looking forward to getting back to other open-source software endeavors (e.g. my target strength R package, acousticTS), and I am always interested in collaborating with folks to develop new tools and analytical methods.

Feel free to email me (brandyn.lucca@gmail.com) or DM me here!

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Hi all!
Scott Loranger here. I am an acoustical oceanographer and my research focuses on the use of broadband backscatter to detect, identify, and quantify water column targets. I tend to lean towards non-biological targets, but I am not opposed to pinging on fish and plankton. I used calibrated backscatter to study an oil spill for my PhD (the Taylor Energy Oil Spill) and after that I worked on a seafloor carbon sequestration monitoring project where we used echo sounders to detect a CO2 seep and determine the flow rate.

I’ve worked with hydrothermal vents (shout out to @DavidBarclay!), mixed biological aggregations, and mapping water masses with acoustic backscatter.

In my current role as an Acoustician and Applications Scientist at Kongsberg Discovery I get to work with scientists around the world to broaden the use of broadband acoustics. If you have questions about how to work with broadband data, or how to design a broadband experiment, please don’t hesitate to reach out!
Thank you for inviting me to the group!

-Scott

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Hi all!
Sven Gastauer here…I am a fisheries acoustician currently working at the Thünen Insititute of Sea Fisheries in Bremerhaven, Germany. In parallel I hold a visiting scholar position at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (University of California, San Diego), Integrative Oceanography. I currently am the chair of the ICES Working Group on International Pelagic Surveys.

Growing up in a land locked country I knew fairly little about oceans, except that they are kind of saltier than lakes and that there are some fish in there (or at least that’s what I was told). After studying Environmental Sciences with a specialisation in hydrology (and a thesis on habitat preferences of blue sheep in the Dhorpatan region of the Himalayas…), I somehow ended up in a Master Program about Marine Environmental protection. My interest in the ocean was developed after I did a traineeship at Wageningen Marine Research (formerly known as IMARES or RIVO) in the Netherlands. Arriving at my traineeship interview, soaked in bike chain oil (because my bike broke down multiple times on my way to the institute, to the point that I was running and hitchhiking the last few kilometers), completely ignorant of any ocean specific questions, I somehow managed to get the position. Later, it turns out the other candidates were all dressed up in suits and the institute wanted someone they can send out to sea, so they called the “mechanic”. This was it, I got an Echoview 3 dongle and the book by MacLennan and Simmonds and was told this is all you need. After reading the blue book cover to cover and probably going through the entire Echoview help file in a 3 weeks, Eric Armstrong (who sadly passed away very recently) taught me some more tricks during the blue whiting survey West of the Birtish Isles in April.
Since then I have worked in acoustics, my work has taken me to a number of surveys in the Northeast Atlantic, I did my PhD in the more tropical waters off Northwestern Australia, a postdoc at the University of Tasmania / the Australian Antarctic Division, followed by a postdoc at Scripps before taken on a permanent position at the Thünen Institute.

My main interests are target strength estimates (in situ, ex situ, and modelling), survey uncertainty estimates and working with autonomous platforms (at Scripps I work a lot with Spray gliders and derivatives like the Zooglider). In recent years I ahve also collaborated with visual artist Claudine Arendt to create porcelain vessels based on the target strength of different key zooplankton and fish species, she has created live sized wooden target strength sculptures that pump air at you in the rythm of a Zooglider mission, we have made the acoustics recordings of one Zooglider dive audible within the context of a larger installation at the Matsu Art Biennial in Taiwan and more…

Feel free to reach out any time!

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Hello. David Demer is joining. Blame Sven. I am presently NOAA Fisheries’ Senior Scientist for Survey and Data Acquisitions; a Research Associate with the Marine Physical Laboratory at Scripps Institution of Oceanography; and an editor for the ICES Journal of Marine Science. Like Sven, I am from a landlocked state and I studied engineering. My early aquatic experiences were as a swimmer and water polo player. I worked for Intel in a second desert state. I dove with SCUBA, ran rivers, and surfed and sailed before I caught the marine science bug and embarked on graduate studies in Applied Ocean Science. I joined NOAA in 1990, spent cumulative years at sea, and first developed an acoustic survey of Antarctic krill. In addition to my studies in the Southern Ocean, I investigated zooplankton and fish stocks, predator-prey interactions, and ecosystems along the west coast of North America from the Sea of Cortes to the Bering Sea; along the east coast from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of Maine; in the Irish, Ligurian, and Red Seas, and off South Africa. In 1999, I created the Advanced Survey Technologies Program to develop and apply technology for improving marine living resource surveys. My team and I developed instrumented small craft, spar buoys, towed and cast camera systems, and NOAA Fisheries’ first AUV. We developed techniques to measure multi-frequency TS; 3-D velocities of fish schools; animal scattering and absorption spectra, density, behavior and growth rate; and 3-D shapes, spectra and directivity of animal aggregations, and within-beam range, slope, hardness, roughness, and lithology of seabed. In addition to these developments, we routinely adopted commercial technologies on the “bleeding edge”, e.g., EK500, SM2000, EK60, EK80, M3, ME70, MS70, and SX90; and BI500, EP500, and Echoview. Recently, I have spent more time in the pool than at sea, and thinking about what’s next.

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Geoff Matt here. Unlike Sven and Dave I come from one a town which is famous for marine work in the UK - Southampton. But I managed to studiously avoid all things requiring me to be on a boat for many years.
My background is applied physics, and have been involved in all sorts of engineering from Mars spacecraft to sonars for submarines. Currently the engineering manager for Echoview and am happy to contribute whatever I think I know about acoustics

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Hi, I’m Paul Fernandes, a fisheries scientist based at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. I did my first degree in Marine Biology at Port Erin Marine Laboratory on the Isle of Man, which was part of Liverpool University (which sadly closed in 2005 and is now completely gone). Anyway, it was such a wonderful place I stayed on to do my PhD there with Richard Nash, who introduced me to fisheries sonar (Ron Mitsons textbook, a precursor to Fisheries Acoustics). I studied the western Irish Sea tidal mixing front, with Simrad EY-200Ps, one of the first portable echosounders, with an “integrated” inkjet printer: it was noisy, especially at 200 kHz.

After that I did two years (92-93) in Bolivia, waiting for a boat to be ready for an acoustic survey of Lake Titicaca. It never came. So I spent two years helping fishermen conserve rainbow trout and doing dodgy length-based assessments in Elefan: another wonderful place though. Then I went to Ireland and did acoustic surveys all around the Emerald Isle, most of them in the Celtic Sea, but also the west coast and the Irish Sea. Loved it there, working with the legend John Molloy! But they had to let me go (and many others!) when some project accounting went wrong.

Luckily, I met John Simmonds at an ICES WGFAST meeting in 1994 and he had already offered me a job at the Sonar Section in the Marine Lab Aberdeen. I spent 17 fantastic years at the lab. At first doing herring acoustic surveys with John, Dave Reid, Phil Copland and Eric Armstrong (whose funeral we go to on Monday :cry:); geostatistics with John, Jacques Rivoirard, Ken Foote, and Nicolas Bez; sending AUVs out to sea with my best pal Andrew Brierley (:cry:); multibeam sonar with Francois Gerlotto; multifrequency acoustics with Rolf Kornelliussen, Jacques Masse and Anne Lebourges; mackerel acoustic surveys with Rolf & Egil Ona; Lake Victoria acoustic surveys with David MacLennan (:cry:) and herring TS (with my PhD student Sascha Fässler). ICES WGFAST meetings in the 90s were legendary! I then got roped into running trawl surveys for monkfish, and demersal stock assessments, ultimately leading the sea fisheries group and developing a range of other fisheries projects & activities. I missed out on a few ICES WGFAST meetings in the mid 2000s because they clashed with stock assessment working groups which were nowhere near as fun!

By this time the sonar section had been closed down and research at the lab was dwindling, so I left the scientific civil service in 2011 to become an academic at the University of Aberdeen. I had been teaching there as a visiting lecturer since the mid 90’s on their fisheries course, so the transition was straightforward, although I had a bit more teaching to do (marine ecology) and there were more student projects to supervise. I revived my interests in fisheries acoustics there, working on mackerel acoustics (with my PhD student Ben Scoulding); combining active and passive acoustics to study sprat and porpoises (Joshua Lawrence PhD student); mackerel icefish in the Southern Ocean (Niall Fallon, PhD student); broadband (with Alan Fenwick); Greenland cod (James Dunning PhD student); imaging sonar (PhD student Ed Sibley); and the Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition (Andrew Brierley, Inigo Everson, Roland Proud, Joshua Lawrence et al). Tried to keep up with fisheries science too, working with monkfish assessments (PhD student Rufus Danby), elasmobranchs (PhD student Jessica Monhart, MSc student Janne Haugen, IUCN), ecosystem modelling (Alan Baudron); climate change in fisheries (PhD students Ikpewe Idongesit and Jonathan Ellis); discard/bycatch mitigation (Smartrawl); and the use of uncrewed surface vehicles (USV) to study fish around artificial marine structures.

I moved to Heriot-Watt University in 2022 to pursue lines of marine technology, working with their new National Robotarium and the Oceans System Lab (Yvan Petillot). Here, I work with Joshua Lawrence et al, on a few projects which involve fisheries acoustics to study fish around artificial marine structures, such as windfarms. We are developing USVs and AUVs for this purpose, equipping them with Simrad WBT minis - a portable echosounder somewhat smaller than the ones I started with back in 1988! You can find out more here.

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Hi all!

My name is Maxime Duranson, and I’m currently a PhD student at the Thünen Institute of Sea Fisheries in Bremerhaven, Germany, under the supervision of Sven Gastauer and Matthias Schaber. I completed my Master’s degree in Marine Sciences, specializing in Oceanography, Biology, and Marine Ecology, with a focus on Modeling and Data Analysis/Statistics, at the Mediterranean Institute of Oceanology (MIO) at Aix-Marseille University, France.

I was not initially destined for the field of hydroacoustics until I completed my Master’s internship on the fine-scale distribution of zooplankton in a frontal zone. This project involved analyzing samples collected with nets as well as processing acoustic recordings. I particularly enjoyed the latter aspect, which led me to apply for the PhD position I have held since November 2024.

My PhD aims to improve the accuracy of stock assessments for saithe (Pollachius virens) in the North Sea by using data from commercial vessels. The goal is to estimate the abundance of this species based on these commercial data, which requires a better understanding of its acoustic scattering properties, particularly through the determination of a TS-L equation (using X-ray Scan and KRM model). Ultimately, my idea is to apply geostatistics to obtain a reliable estimate of saithe abundance in the North Sea.

I am completely new to this field and still have everything to learn, especially from experts like you.

Thank you very much for the invitation to this group—it’s a great opportunity for me to learn, and I’m sure I will benefit greatly from it.

Maxime

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Hi all!

My name is Aditya Krishna. I am a 1st year Electrical and Computer Engineering PhD student at the University of Washington, Seattle. I am working with @leewujung in the Echospace group at the Applied Physics Laboratory, UW.

My research background has been in using passive acoustic monitoring methods to study the activity of echolocating bats found nearby. I’m currently planning to submit my paper investigating duty-cycle subsampling schemes to enable low-cost and long-term PAM for bats which often requires high-frequency sampling rates (>100kHz) and weeks of data.

I am interested in developing our acoustic monitoring methods (such as incorporating microphone arrays) to better study the foraging strategies used by the bats. This ties into my overarching interest in understanding the decision making in echolocating animals and how their strategies for foraging can be translated into machine learning problems such as source-tracking using acoustics.

Very exciting to be a part of this! Feel free to email me at adkris@uw.edu or DM me here!

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Hi,

I am Benoit Berges, currently a research scientist at Wageningen Marine Research (WMR) in the Netherlands.

I studied Engineering in France and ended up in Southampton for a master in acoustics and PhD in underwater acoustics. My PhD focused on detecting and quantifying gas leaks using passive and active acoustics. My expertise in active acoustics led me to my current position at WMR in the field of fisheries acoustics, to lead acoustic surveys and work on various research projects. I still have a focus on fisheries acoustics but ended up developing in other fields: passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) of marine mammals, acoustic telemetry to monitor fish movement and conducting fish stock assessments for catch advice and models to evaluate fishing management.

Lately in fisheries acoustics, I have a strong interest in the development of open source tools to standardize and process echosounder data, especially using AI.

I never used discourse before but it looks like a great way to interact more directly!

Benoit

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Hi all,

My name is Camille Pagniello. I am an Assistant Professor of Oceanographic Engineering at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.

My research interests span underwater acoustics and ocean instrumentation primarily for biological applications. I lead the Marine Innovation Lab for Leading-edge Oceanography, where we focus on developing hardware and software to expand the ocean observing network and for the sustainable management of natural resources.

I am likely recruiting graduate students in ocean acoustics for next Fall 2026. Always happy to chat about science and build new collaborations. Feel free to shoot me an email or DM for a chat.

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Hi Everyone,

Sven did this to me too - you’re not alone, @ddemer.

I work at ASL Environmental Sciences as an Acoustics Scientist and AZFP Product Manager. In this role I help to develop new instrumentation and make existing tools more helpful.

My background started in physics (undergrad) and morphed into sonar signal processing (grad). As an undergrad I thought nuclear physics and radiation detection was pretty cool, but later on I realized that I had lost the ability to visualize some key concepts (I’ve seen apples fall from trees, but I have never ‘seen’ time dilation or experienced wave/particle duality). I realized that I was just doing math. Same as anyone else would, I decided Doppler sonar signal processing in the context of a multi-angle swath bathymetry sidescan must be the best next step (M.A.Sc.). That was pretty fun, and signal processing was strangely easier for me to ‘visualize’ than the physics I’d been doing. So, if some is good then more must be better, right? I stuck around for a Ph.D. in the same lab, this time using beamforming on receive to mitigate multipath interference (also in the context of a multi-angle swath bathymetry sidescan sonar).

At that point it was too late, and I decided that sonar and underwater acoustics were pretty fun, especially after discovering that this community is what it is. Not every professional community is as collaborative and kind. It has been a treat to get to work in this field.

Please reach out if you think I can be helpful in some way. In case I miss a message on here, you can find me at spearce (at) asl (dot) com.

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