Commencement 2015 Awards
On June 6, 2015, Joint Program commencement was held at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The following awards were presented to alumni and current students of the Joint Program.
Ruth and Paul Fye Award for Excellence in Oceanographic Research Graduate Student Best Paper Award
On the occasion of Paul M. Fye's retirement as Director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and in special recognition of his and Ruth Fye's personal interest in the graduate program and students, the employees of the Institution established an endowed fund through personal contributions to support an award for the best graduate student paper. The process of selections has evolved to presenting the award every five or six years for the best paper by a graduate student in each of the five subdisciplines of the Joint Program, as well as an award for an interdisciplinary paper. An eligible paper is one that has been published in press or submitted between February 1, 2010 and January 31, 2015 and is based on work performed while the author was a student in the WHOI or MIT-WHOI Joint Graduate Program.
Applied Ocean Physics & Engineering: Melissa Moulton (current student)
Biology: Kristen Hunter-Cevera (2014)
Marine Chemistry & Geochemistry: Erin Bertrand (2012)
Geology & Geophysics: Adam Sarafian (current student)
Physical Oceanography: Stephanie Waterman (2009)
Interdisciplinary Research: Julie van der Hoop (current student)
Interdisciplinary Research: Naomi Levine (2010)
Earl Ewing Hays Award
The Earl Ewing Hays Award was established by his friends in memory of Earl’s deep devotion to education and his enjoyment of the company and intellectual stimulation of students. Earl was a Senior Scientist and Chair of the WHOI Ocean Engineering Department for many years. The award in his memory is granted periodically to an MIT-WHOI Joint Program graduate student who has made an imaginative and unique contribution to the art of ocean engineering and ocean instrumentation as documented in a report, presented paper, publication, patent or copyright filing.
For his doctoral thesis work, this year's awardee, Christopher Murphy (2012), developed software to compress audio and visual tranmissions so that they could be efficiently transmitted to or from autonomous underwater vehicles. Chris’s work was the first to demonstrate an end-to-end engineering system with such functionality. He did this with open source software and demonstrated that it worked with completely different types of autonomous vehicles.
Graduate Reception 2017 Awards
Earl Ewing Hays Award
Erin Fischell, Characterization of Underwater Target Geometry from Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Sampling of Bistatic Acoustic Scattered Fields
Maha Haji, Extraction of Uranium from Seawater: Design and Testing of a Symbiotic System