Melissa Omand

Biography

Melissa Omand is an Oceanographer with broad interdisciplinary interests, applying her training in physics and physical oceanography to examine biogeochemical and ecological processes throughout the upper ocean and twilight zone. She designs low-cost instrumentation that will ultimately help quantify organic carbon fluxes over distributed, persistent scales. Melissa earned a B.Sc. in Physics from the University of Guelph in 2004. After graduation she spent time canoe guiding and skiing, and then returned to Guelph to work on simulations of x-ray induced emissions by Martian rocks (observed by the NASA rovers Spirit and Opportunity) in the PIXE group of Dr. Iain Campbell. Her desire to combine physics and earth science led her to the PhD program in Physical Oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography under advisors Drs. Falk Feddersen and Peter Franks. Her graduate work focused upon the transport and mixing of nutrients and red tide organisms in the inner shelf and surfzone. After graduation in 2011, she moved to Cape Cod, where she was a postdoctoral associate with Dr. Amala Mahadevan at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Since January 2015, she has held a faculty position at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography and was recently promoted to Associate Professor.