Elements of my Story

On this page I reflect on what brought me to where I am, thus offering a bit of my personal story.

Education

In one form or another, I was a formal student until age 33. Today I still go to school, only now as a research scientist, lecturer, and sometimes student. Alas, education never stops, for the teacher is the perpetual student.

LSU ChE

I completed a bachelors of science in chemical engineering from Louisiana State University (1981-1986). At LSU in the 1980s, there were few undergraduate degrees that could compete with chemical engineering for the rigor, intensity, and depth of the degree requirements. Although I enjoyed many aspects of engineering and chemistry, I was not attracted to the idea of working for a large petro-chemical corporation that pursued its profits often at the expense of the environment. Road trips down the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans taught me a great deal about the consequences of that use of knowledge long before global warming and coastal erosion were everyday experiences.

Today I appreciate that some remedies to environmental degradation come from smart engineering practices. However, as an undergraduate in the 1980s my views of chemical engineering were inconsistent with my views on sustainability and ecology. I thus chose to drop from my bucket list the idea of becoming a practicing engineer.

Northwestern Un Applied Maths

After LSU, I completed a masters degree at the Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics department of Northwestern University (1986-1987). This year of course-work was an incredibly valuable and intense initiation into the methods and practices of theoretical science and engineering. Although I found life at Northwestern enjoyable and fulfilling, my urge to dive into theoretical physics drove me to leave the applied maths program after a masters.

UW Physics

After Northwestern, I returned to undergraduate school, this time in physics at the University of Washington (1987-1988). This time allowed me to explore the reality of my dream of doing physics. I also became exposed to the quest for beauty and unity that so deeply drives physicists, and which remains part of how I approach research and teaching. I chose UW for this transition year since I spent roughly seven years in the Puget Sound region of Washington during the 1970s, and my father lived in Tacoma until his passing in 2023.

UPenn Physics

I completed a PhD in theoretical high energy physics at the University of Pennsylvania (1988-1993). My thesis concerned elements of cosmology and string theory. Notably, the only computer work I did was to use LaTeX for typesetting documents and an off-the-shelf differential equations package to generate a topological solution to a cosmic domain wall (basically a hyperbolic tangent). Otherwise, all of my thesis work was completed with a pencil, paper, and brain.

Princeton post-doc

Towards the end of my time as a PhD student, I decided to switch to geosciences with a focus on ocean and climate physics. That decision led me to do a postdoc at Princeton in the geosciences department, working at GFDL under the mentorship of Kirk Bryan. This 2+ years as a post-doc was both a time for research and a time for taking courses on topics that I had little exposure to while studying in a physics department, such as fluid mechanics and earth system dynamics. I got the hang of it, sufficient to land a job as a federal scientist at GFDL starting spring 1996. That transition also saw me getting married (now with a son, born 2006) and settling in Princeton.

GFDL staff, Princeton University faculty, LOCEAN/CNRS in Paris

I worked as a GFDL staff physical scientist from spring 1996 until spring 2025, and from 2014 to 2025 I served as a faculty member of the Princeton University Atmosphere/Ocean Sciences program teaching geophysical fluid mechanics. Upon retirement from GFDL in May 2025, I took at position at the LOCEAN laboratory at IPSL in Paris France starting Feb 2026, funced by the Choose France for Science program and appointed through the CNRS. The move to Paris has energized my efforts in theoretical ocean physics and numerical ocean modeling, offering me the opportunities to work among the French and broader European community of ocean and climate scientists. I am extremely privileged and honored with this new role.

Reflections

My unusually diverse (somewhat random!) education resulted from an early fascination with the natural world, and the ability of science, engineering, and maths to help understand and describe the world. More practically, it resulted from the difficulty I had choosing a particular intellectual path. Even so, one thing I appreciated quite early on was the relative freedom offered to the academic and the researcher. I could ask for nothing more fulfilling and compelling than to be paid to learn from great minds, to deepen understanding through research, and to teach the next generation of students. If you like to work on your own agenda, then research is a path to consider!

About my Style

My "paper and pencil" experience as a masters and PhD student is in apparent contrast to much of my ongoing research in which computer simulations play a central role. However, there is more to the story. Even though I have contributed research and development energies to numerical codes and global circulation models, I firmly retain the concepts, tools, and prejudices engendered from studies of theoretical/mathematical physics, each of which guide my research and mentoring activities. Nearly all of the code I have written originated from pencil and paper equatinos, then translated to LaTeX, and only then did it find its way into Fortran or Python. I consider computer simulations to be constrained by the quality of human brains used to build numerical models and to analyze their output, far more than computer power. As Jerry Mahlman emphasized when he hired me in 1996, software and hardware are of little use for science unless they are strongly coupled to brainware.

What drew me to theoretical sciences, in particular to physics, was a growing interest in general concepts and ideas rather than to particular solutions and technology. Being able to solve an equation is important, and my training in applied maths, engineering, and numerical methods have certainly taught me many critical tools for doing so. But what attracts me the most to physics is the quest for fundamental understanding of how Nature works, with that understanding generally transcending the details of a particular solution.

Why the Ocean?

On or around 1990, Jerry Mahlman, then director of GFDL, gave a talk at UPenn physics concerning earth system science. I recall putting his name on a note in my desk after the talk, along with "interesting stuff". I then returned to the matters at hand, which involved completing my PhD and getting a postdoc.

Nearing the end of my PhD work in early 1993, I did plenty of "naval gazing" to decide my next step in life. Reflection led me to realize that my skills were both broad and deep, and that my passions drew me to use those skills to help understand the natural world that is directly experienced, in particular the ocean and atmosphere. I was thus inspired to connect with Dr. Mahlman who generously invited me to visit GFDL to see if a "physics re-tread" could bring something to his wonderful lab.

I visited GFDL a handfull of times during the spring of 1993, meeting GFDL giants like Suki Manabe (who won the 2021 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on global warming), Isaac Held, one of the world's preeminant atmospheric and climate dynamicists, Kiku Miyakoda, whose work led to the invention of extended range weather forecasts that greatly influenced the origns of the European Centre for Weather Forecasting, Yoshio Kurihara, whose work led to great advances in hurricane predictions, Isidoro Orlanski, , one of the world's preeminant mesoscale meteorologists, and Kirk Bryan, the father of numerical oceanography and my postdoc mentor from Sept 1993 to June 1996. Before the postdoc officially started, and only two weeks after my PhD defense on cosmic domain walls and time machines, Kirk put me on a plane to Nova Scotia (using his personal funds!) to join a research cruise to the Labrador Sea on a Canadien research vessel (The Hudson). The chief scientist was John Lazier. Another member of the scientist crew was Peter Rhines, who served as the ship's intellectual guru. That trip was a rapid initiation into seagoing oceanography, and I was definitely hooked!

I have often pondered how inevitable it was for me to transition from theoretical physics to oceanography. One reason perhaps originates from many years living at or near the seashore or near lakes and rivers. My father was in the US Air Force, so my family moved every three to four years while growing up: Texas, Louisiana, Hawaii, California, Washington State, and the Mississippi Coast. Bodies of water, and in particular the ocean, became part of my DNA. From this perspective is seems natural that my heart would lead my head to do research in ocean science.

Meditation

My gratitude for the freedom offered by research and teaching aligns with my studies and practices of meditation since 1982. Meditation offers a complement to my quest for an objective and scientific understanding of nature. It does so by providing a system to organize, observe, and appreciate subjective experiences without the mind chatter of judgment and achievement. For me, meditation fosters an awareness of the way things are rather than the way I may think they are.

One may imagine the stillness realized via meditation to bring about an absence of awareness or perception. Yet my experience is quite the opposite. As the mind fluctuations quiet and the distance between thoughts expands, awareness opens to render a direct experience of nature absent a patina engendered by the intellect, emotions, and thoughts. Removal of boundaries cultivates understanding and intuition. A practical result is that meditation sparks insights and creativity while instilling patience, persistence, humility, gratitude, and compassion.

Here is a presentation on meditation I gave during the virtual 2022 AGU Ocean Sciences meeting.
Here is a presentation on meditation I gave to the GFDL and Princeton AOS community on 29 July 2020, shared as a virtual event.
Here is a brief presentation on meditation I gave during the 2020 AGU Ocean Sciences in San Diego.