Event Details


Hannah Mark is a PhD student in WHOI’s Department of Marine Geology & Geophysics. Her research broadly concerns the structure and evolution of oceanic lithosphere. As she said “I’m interested in what we can learn about the lithosphere both from seismic data and from numerical models. I did my undergrad at the University of Chicago, double-majoring in physics and geophysical sciences, and I worked in a high pressure mineral physics lab there on stuff that is mostly unrelated to what I do now.” She will talk “about the lithosphere-asthenosphere boundary: what it is, how we study it, and why anyone should care about it. A little plate tectonics, a little seismology.”

Dr. Kirstin Meyer is a marine biologist specializing in benthic ecology. She studies communities of invertebrates (like barnacles, anemones, and sea squirts) on hard substrata (like rocks, docks, and shipwrecks) to understand how these communities are assembled and how and why they change over time. She hails originally from Michigan but has lived in Germany, Norway, and Oregon. Her research endeavors have taken her to the Arctic and on research ships all over the world. After finishing her Ph.D. at the University of Oregon last year, she moved to Massachusetts and is now a postdoctoral scholar at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.  The title of her talk will be “Fauna most foul: discovering how and why dock fouling communities change over time.” She’ll be talking about the work she is doing around Woods Hole this summer. She has two experiments going, at the WHOI dock and in Eel Pond, and is trying to figure out the mechanisms of succession for invertebrates on the docks (how and why the communities change over time). 

Jim Yoder, WHOI’s Dean of Education will introduce the speakers.

The Joint Program between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has been in existence since 1968, linking these two topnotch academic institutions in a co-operative program in graduate studies in oceanography, granting a joint PhD. The students spend part of their time in Cambridge at MIT and part in Woods Hole. Typically, students spend the first two years of the program at MIT—though this depends on the student’s specialty and advisor. Most students spend summer semesters at WHOI. On both campuses, students have the resources of a world-class research institution at their fingertips.