Alison Sweeney I have been invited along on this expedition as a guest with Kakani’s group, from my biophysics lab at Yale University. Kakani’s group is interested in mechanical bioinspiration—how do very small animals move through water? The answers are often very counterintuitive. In my case, I am interested in optical bioinspiration, where life’s solutions …

  Hi, I’m Joost Daniels and I’m a research tech in the Bioinspiration Group. In true Bioinspiration fashion, my main job on this week-long cruise consists of two parts: bringing the lab to the ocean, and bringing the ocean to the lab. For the former, we’ve brought our DeepPIV instrument along, mounted on the remotely …

I joined MBARI in February of this year to work with Kakani Katija and the Bioinspiration Group to build EyeRIS, perhaps the first ever deep-sea plenoptic (3D) imaging system. This project, funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, aims to develop a suite of 3D imaging systems for studying particle fields, small-scale fluid mechanics, …

  I’m Susan von Thun and I work in MBARI’s video lab. The video lab is the group that takes all of the video produced from the many MBARI video platforms and archives it in a centralized video library. We watch the video, recording observations about the ocean life, habitat, equipment, and anything of interest …

Diana Li This year, I received the best birthday present—an invitation to go on a six-day expedition out in Monterey Bay on the R/V Western Flyer with Kakani Katija’s BioInspiration Group at MBARI! Hey y’all, my name is Diana Li, and I’m a recent graduate from Stanford’s Ph.D. program in Biology. I studied how the …