POGO-SCOR Fellowships 2009

Dr Aiken is a research associate with the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, where he is developing an innovative coastal observing network in the Chilean fjords using ferries as ships of opportunity, known as FOCA (Ferries Ovservando los Canales Australes). Dr Aiken spent 1½ months at CSIRO, under the supervision of Mr Ken Ridgeway, Leader of the IMOS Ship of Opportunity Facility with assistance from Prof. Gary Meyers, Director of IMOS at the University of Tasmania. During this time Dr Aiken received specific training in various aspects of Australia’s Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) and Ship of Opportunity (SOOP) facility that are of relevance to the Chilean project.

Mr Canhanga is a researcher at the National Institute for Hydrography and Navigation (INAHINA) in Mozambique, where he is responsible, amongst other things, for the tide analyses and prediction. He is also on a national group designated to establish numerical models as a tool to support the decision-makers on the best decision for sustainable coastal development. Mr Canhanga has been spending the month of January at the University of Aveiro in Portugal, under the supervision of Prof. J Dias, time being devoted to improving Mr Canhanga’s knowledge of the morphodynamic modelling system being used by the Estuarine Group, its potential and limitations.

Dr Cerdeira is an expert analyst in remote sensing with The National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (CONABIO) in Mexico. The fellowship period of two months with Dr Thomas Heege at Earth Observation and Mapping (EOMAP) in Germany was used to train Dr Cerdeira in the use of hyperspectral data to derive standardised products such as suspended matter, phytoplankton and coloured organic material from both deep inland and coastal waters. EOMAP and CONABIO also intended that this fellowship would lead to future joint developments in ocean monitoring, such as geophysical parameters and maritime ecosystems, for example the Mexican coral reefs.

Ms Ferreira has been a PhD student at the Federal University of Rio Grande in the Laboratory of Ocean and Climate Studies, Institute of Oceanography since March 2006. Since that time she has been involved in the project PATagonian EXperiment (PATEX) and has conducted many of the bio-optical measurements in six of the seven cruises in the Patagonian shelf break region. She was lead author on a publication in Deep Sea Research I in 2009 relating to this research. She spent two months with the team in the Laboratoire d'Océanologie et de Géosciences (LOG) in France, under the supervision of Dr Alvain, improving her knowledge of the assessment of water biogeochemical characterisation from optical measurements, a topic closely related to her doctorate research. Dr Alvain was particularly interested in collaborating with Ms Ferreira to develop bio-optical and remote sensing observation from ocean colour satellite sensors in order to study optical properties and dominant phytoplankton groups in Patagonian shelf-break waters.

Ms Kahkashan is a marine chemist research scientist in the Chemical Oceanography Section at the National Institute of Oceanography (NIOI) in Pakistan. Her fields of interest are marine pollution monitoring (organic pollutants) and their impact on the marine environment including Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs). She is currently responsible for carrying out extraction, cleanup and fractionation of organic pollutants in marine environmental samples for a project entitled ‘Establishment of PAK-EPA Marine Water Pollution Monitoring Center at NIO’. Ms Kahkashan spent three months at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography under the supervision of Dr Rainer Lomann. She was trained in preparing, deploying, analysing and interpreting the results from using passive polyethylene samplers in coastal waters. Polyethylene samplers are very cost-effective and versatile and will provide Ms Kahkashan and NIO an efficient tool to start their own coastal observation programme.

Mr Singh is a Senior Research Fellow at the Physical Research Laboratory, Goa, India, where he was offered a Graduate Student Fellowship two years ago working with Prof. Ramesh addressing oceanographic problems. Mr Singh spent three months training in the new subject of ‘The role of anaerobic ammonium oxidation (anammox) in nitrogen-loss from Indian coastal waters’ under the supervision of Dr Marcel Kuypers at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology. Both Mr Singh’s parent and host institutions saw this as an opportunity to initiate new collaborations between marine scientists in India and institutions in northern Germany.

Dr van der Molen is a Post Doctoral Fellow within the African Coelacanth Ecosystem Programme (ACEP) funded by the National Research Foundation (NRF) based at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in South Africa. Within ACEP a multi-disciplinary team of researchers have been working on a study (2009 to 2011) of several aspects of the Natal Bight Ecosystem. Dr van der Molen’s task was to study the temporal and spatial distribution of the phytoplankton. The fellowship was granted to enable Dr van der Molen to attend a two-week Taxonomy Workshop co-organised by the Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science (SAHFOS)-Marine Biological Association (MBA) Marine Phytoplankton in Plymouth, UK, which he undertook in July 2009. Thereafter he visited the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany for two weeks and was trained in molecular techniques under the supervision of Dr Kerstin Töbe. This has been successfully completed with all those involved expressing the wish to maintain contact and investigate future collaborations.

Mr Vieira is Assistant to the Site Manager of the Tropical Eastern North Atlantic Time-Series Observatory (TENATSO), Instituto Nacional de Desenvolvimento das Pescas, Cape Verde. TENATSO is a unique fixed-point ocean time series, presently implemented as a collaboration between Germany (IFM-GEOMAR), the UK (National Oceanography Centre, Southampton) and Cape Verde. During the fellowship period of three months, Mr Vieira received CTD training on maintenance, calibration and data processing at IFM-GEOMAR under the supervision of Dr Gerd Krahmann. This has provided the Institute with local capacity to undertake ongoing tasks, such as monthly sampling, and has enabled both the Institute and TENATSO to respond to enquiries from foreign scientists on an individual basis and in relation to scientific programmes.

Mr Saldías is pursuing a MS degree at the University of Concepción with the thesis research of river plume dynamics off central Chile. He is hoping to be able to combine the in situ hydrographic data collected during the past three years over the continental shelf with remote sensing observations. His fellowship will be spent with a research group led by Prof. Ricardo Letelier at the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University, USA, commencing in March 2010. Prof. Letelier’s group has been monitoring and studying the dynamics of the particular region over several years using satellite data and will train Mr Saldías in the analysis of remote sensing images and share their protocols and analytical tools with him.

Ms Keerthi is a project assistant in the project ‘Dynamics and thermodynamic of the equatorial Indian Ocean: an Argo perspective’ at the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO), India and has been working on ARGO profiles to understand the ocean dynamics and its response to atmospheric forcing. She is now aiming to pursue a PhD programme using ARGO profiles. Ms Keerthi spent her three month fellowship period at IFREMER working under the supervision of
Clément de Boyer Montégut on the inter-annual variability of the mixed layer in the Indian Ocean using in situ data.

Mr Kumar is currently pursuing his PhD at the South China Sea Institute of Oceanology in the area of Biological and Remote Sensing Marine Ecology under the guidance of Prof. D Tang. He recently started his two month fellowship period at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science under the supervision of Dr K Tang, receiving training on the ecophysiology of Phaeocystis and use of state-of-the-art instrumentation such as PAM, gas chromatograph and epifluorescence microscopy to conduct hypothesis-driven research aiming to understand the biology and ecology of that algal group.