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.

2020 Recipient
Becket Colson, Development of Novel Sensor for Flow-Through Microplastics Detection, Ocean Sciences, AGU 2020;

Patent application: System and method of use for electrically differentiating particles in a liquid

2017 Recipients

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

2015 Recipient

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.

2010 Recipient
Christopher Roman, for the paper titled “A Self-Consistent Bathymetric Mapping Algorithm” published in the Journal of Field Robotics in 2007 with Hanu Singh