Event Details


Anna Wargula has just defended her PhD thesis in the MIT/WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography in the Department of Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering. Her research focuses on coastal ocean physics, with the goal to better understand how storms affect the movement of water on the coast. In the summers she can most often be found underwater in her scuba gear fixing oceanographic instruments to the seafloor to measure the flows, water levels, and waves. Anna is originally from western PA and holds a bachelors in mechanical engineering from Grove City College, a liberal arts college north of Pittsburgh. Her talk is titled “The mystery of eddies and my quest for one in Waquoit Bay.”

Dr. Maria Dolores Perez Hernandez, known as Lola to her friends, is originally from the Canary Islands, Spain. She tells us “There, I did my Ph.D. at the Instituto de Oceanografía y Cambio Global (IOCAG). During those years I studied  the circulation of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. During my Ph.D. I did three research stays at Scripps (California), Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the National Oceanography Centre of Southampton (U.K.). Currently I’m a postdoc at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution studying the Atlantic inflow in the Arctic Ocean. I have participated in ten oceanographic cruises, the latest one in the new R.V. Neil Armstrong and I have a total of 10 research papers. In the near future I’m moving to Iceland where I have a permanent position at the Marine and Freshwater Research Institute.” The title of her talk is “The Atlantic Water boundary current north of Svalbard.”

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.