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unexpectedly after my first year of graduate work, but at the same time James H. Miller came to the URI Ocean Engineering Department. I took Miller’s signal-pro- cessing course that fall and was looking for guidance on how to continue moving forward with my MS research. I ended up convincing H. Thomas Rossby that tracking his SOund Fixing And Ranging (RAFOS) floats (RAFOS is SOFAR spelled backward; they are floats that listen for signals and are used to map ocean currents well below the surface) was just like tracking vocalizing whales, and I completed a modeling sensitivity study of the critical parameters for passive acoustics tracking of marine mammals for my thesis.
In the meantime, I needed funding and Miller connected me with William T. Ellison at Marine Acoustics, Inc. (MAI). MAI is a scientific and engineering company that provides environmental consulting, research and devel- opment, and naval technology and training services to a diverse set of government, corporate, and international clients. I started working part-time for MAI as part of a research team studying the potential effects of the US Navy’s Surveillance Towed Array Sensor System (SUR- TASS) Low Frequency Active (LFA) acoustics system.
This work transitioned into a full-time job, first in the Washington, DC, area, then in Newport, Rhode Island, where I helped to develop research methods and model- ing tools to determine the sensitivity of marine animals to anthropogenic activities and to estimate their exposure in specific scenarios. MAI has developed the Acoustic Integration Model (AIM) that models the four-dimen- sional acoustic field (three-dimensional space + time) into which simulated animals (“animats”) are distributed and through which they move, acting as dosimeters to estimate their acoustic exposure.
To better inform the animal distribution and abundance inputs to AIM, I went back to school to complete my PhD, focusing on using environmental covariates in geospatial models to predict distribution and abundance. While at MAI, I worked my way up from staff scientist to senior scientist to Vice President of Environmental Projects, focusing more on project management and proposal writing in later years. In 2020, I shifted to INSPIRE Envi- ronmental, where I am a principal scientist, focusing on offshore wind activities and using more of my geospatial
skills as part of an integrated team studying seafloor health, benthic habitats, and fisheries interactions.
What is a typical day for you?
I get up around 4:45 a.m. and go for a run; this is my meditation time when I get my best ideas and get myself organized for the day. When I get home, I walk our two dogs and get my 12-year-old daughter, Brierley, off to school at 7:00 a.m., then turn to work. The vast major- ity of my job is computer analyses, writing reports and proposals, and coordinating with colleagues. I don’t really have a “typical” day; I need to address which priority is most urgent at the time while also keeping others moving forward and being productive on our projects. I don’t often take a lunch break because I tend to graze through- out the day. I have been working at home since March 13, 2020, because of COVID-19, so now I try to take a break around 2:00 p.m. when my daughter gets home from school. We will play a little basketball or ping pong or take the dogs for a walk, then she sits down to homework and I continue with my tasks. I wrap up around 5:00 p.m. (or would be home by then if working in the office) and shift to evening activities and dinner preparation. I am the president of our town’s land trust and the president of a local Montessori school’s board of directors, so the juggling act continues!
How do you feel when experiments/projects do not work out the way you expected
them to?
I am disappointed, obviously, but then I try to tease out the individual steps within the project to identify fac- tors that I may not have considered properly or points at which errors may have occurred. I do a lot of modeling so having empirical data and/or a general sense of what the outcome should be is very helpful at retracing steps and ferreting out mistakes.
Do you feel like you have solved the work-life balance problem? Was it always this way? Some days are better than others, but I definitely strug- gle with the work-life balance. My husband, Kenneth B. Raposa, is the research coordinator for the Narragansett Bay Research Reserve, so it is tough to juggle both of our jobs and all of our and our daughter’s activities. Working from home during COVID has been both a blessing and
Fall 2021 • Acoustics Today 71