Members of the Currents Group
Eric Firing is a professor (emeritus) in the Oceanography Department at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His work with ocean current profiling began with a project in the Seychelles in 1975 using the Düing profiler, a self-contained current meter in a housing designed to drift down a guide-wire. From 1981--1983 he used the Pegasus, an acoustically-tracked dropsonde, and in 1984 he began working with shipboard ADCPs.
Julia M. Hummon ("Jules") joined the group in 1994 after getting her Ph.D. in Physical Oceanography from the University of Rhode Island. She has worked extensively at sea with lowered and shipboard ADCPs and has written much of our data processing code. She now supervises all activities, conducts training sessions, and contributes to all aspects of the group's work.
Kellie Terada has been with the Oceanography Department at the University of Hawaii at Manoa since 2002. She started as a student assistant with Dr. Roger Lukas's group, then became a full-time administrative worker in 2008. She has been assisting the Currents Group since 2017 and is responsible for processing orders and tracking payments.
Drew Frambach has a background in Meteorology and spent the last 5 years managing data and computer infrastructure, writing documentation and user guides, and supporting storm-chasing science using a Doppler radar truck.
David Vadnais began as a Mechanical Engineer working on satellite and missile propagation/detection systems for seven years. During this time he returned to school for Computer Science and published two papers in the field of Bioinformatics. David joined the team in 2023.
Jamie Ash completed his Master's Degree in Oceanography at the University of Hawaii in the spring of 2023. He has a background in remote sensing and geospatial analysis. His past research interests include phytoplankton bloom dynamics, ocean-atmosphere gas exchange, and ocean carbonate chemistry. Jamie joined the team in 2023.
Luke Longren joined the team in 2024 after working for a year at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. That followed his MS from the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, where he studied "Automatic Segmentation of Elephant Trunk Muscles" (the title of his thesis). He also has a BS in Physics from Fort Hays State University in Kansas.
Past members
Antonio Goulart has a background in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, with a PhD in Sound and Music Computing. In 2022 he joined our group to work on ADCP signals, systems and operations.
Joseph Gum had spent over 10 years traveling the world's oceans as an instrumentation specialist, data analyst, data manager, programmer, and systems administrator with the University of Hawaii and Scripps Institution of Oceanography before joining the Currents Group in 2020.
Toby Martin had over 20 years experience in oceanographic research technical support before coming to work with us in 2015. He specialized in instrumentation, networking, and computer systems. He worked with all ships, but had primary responsibility for our work with the NOAA fleet. He left in 2023 enjoy retirement, travelling the world with his wife, Joyce.
Thomas Roc has a Ph.D. in Marine Renewable Energy from the University of Plymouth, U.K., and has worked on tidal energy resource modeling in commercial and academic settings. He likes to work on open source solutions for scientific computing and big data analytics. Having joined our group in 2017, he worked on Python development, data processing, and monitoring our installed systems. He left in 2020 to pursue opportunities in his native France.
Uggo de Pinho worked as a physical oceanographer in the Brazilian oil industry for over ten years, analyzing wind, wave, and current measurements and forecasts. He started working with us in 2017: processing ADCP data, installing and monitoring our systems, programming, and training users. In 2018 he earned a PhD from Rio de Janeiro Federal University, Department of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering, with his dissertation on nonlinear water waves. In 2020 he left us to join a company in Norway.