- Matthew Reidenbach
- University of California, Berkeley
My interests in the ocean stem from a lifelong fascination of discovery, particularly in unique and exotic environments. As a kid, I was obsessed by outer space. I wanted to go into space, fly in space, and live in space as an astronaut. As I got older, my interests evolved to studying things closer to home. I liked building things and understanding how things worked. So after high school, I went to Cornell University and studied Civil and Environmental Engineering. While there, I began to focus my studies on topics related to hydraulics, hydrology, and fluid mechanics and discovered that there were all these fascinating and unsolved questions related to other unique and exotic environments much closer to home, namely the oceans. During my senior year I did a research project on tsunami waves and how the size of the wave and slope of the beach affected how far the wave would run–up the coastline. I thought this was a great and interesting question, and it got me hooked on doing research.
After my senior year in college, I entered the graduate program in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University where I still studied waves and fluid flow, but studied them in relation to how they affected biological processes on coral reefs. My Ph.D. research looked at turbulent mixing and mass transport processes in coral reef systems, relating wave dynamics and fluid flow to nutrient and food uptake by the corals. This project entailed a lot of SCUBA diving, and my main study sites were in the Red Sea and Hawaii. The main findings of this research were two–fold: first that corals have an amazing ability to uptake dissolved and particulate matter from the water due to their unique morphologic structure, and second, that wave dynamics and how fluid flow interacts with the shape of the coral can have a profound affect on these uptake rates.
In 2004 I finished my Ph.D. and began a post–doctorate position at U.C. Berkeley. Currently, I am working on how marine organisms detect and track chemical odors in the coastal ocean. This work will someday be used in designing sensors which can sense and locate chemicals (such as pollutants or explosives) within the ocean. But, I am always happy to come back to my first love, working and making discoveries in unique and exotic environments, and what better place to do this than living under the sea in Aquarius.
