Tundi Agardy
The 2006 Rosenstiel School awarded, Dr. Tundi Agardy, is executive director of Sound Seas (Bethesda, MD). Dr. Agardy has more than 20 years of experience working on coastal resource management, marine protected area planning, fishery and other resource management, and capacity building at local, regional, and national levels. She has worked as a team leader and project manager on assignments in the Black Sea region, North, West, and East Africa, Melanesia, the western Pacific, and throughout the Caribbean Basin, for the World Bank, the United National Development Program, and several bilateral organizations, such as USAID. In addition to her technical qualifications, much of her work has focused on institutional strengthening, including training, community development, marketing, and public information campaigns around coastal planning and natural resource management.
Most recently, Dr. Agardy has led the way in three notable projects: Bridging Scales in Marine Resource Management, a set of initiatives that help to promote truly effective marine conservation by improving the interface between public policy and community-based conservation at a more localized level; the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a global assessment of the world’s coastal systems; and Focusing Marine Research on Information for Management, a collection of projects with the world Bank, the Nature Conservancy, and the National Academies of Science to steer marine research in a useful direction for coastal management.
Dr. Agardy earned her bachelor’s of degree in biology at Wellesley College, her master’s in fisheries management (1985) and doctorate biological sciences (1989), both from the University of Rhode Island.
Rickaby’s innovative approach to the measuring changes in atmospheric pCO2 levels during the Cenozoic suggests that direct climate signals of the past are harbored within, and can ultimately be deciphered from, the genetic make-up of existing organisms like marine algae. Her proposed studies are helping to gather extensive and necessary information on the history of pCO2, while also yielding additional insight into the feedback between phytoplankton and climate, the carbon isotopic signatures of the geological record and the mechanistic link between the amino acid sequence and specificity of RUBISCO (an important enzyme in the transfer of inorganic carbon into the biosphere) with a view to enhanced crop photosynthetic efficiency.
McGillicuddy’s research uses field data, satellite remote sensing and numerical models. Projects range from mesoscale ocean dynamics to coastal ocean prediction, bio-optics, marine biogeochemistry, marine ecology, and fisheries oceanography. He also has a distinguished publication record, with more than 52 refereed journal publications to his credit.
He has published extensively on a wide range of topics, including El-Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) dynamics, climate predictability, stochastic climate modeling, thermohaline circulation stability, paleoclimatic variations, biophysical interactions in the ocean, and coral bleaching. Timmermann was a co-author of three chapters in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 3rd Assessment Report.
Of particular relevance to RSMAS is his recent research on the physiology of water balance in marine bony fish, animals that are continually faced with the threat of dehydration living in an environment that is 3 times saltier than their own body fluids. A fascinating spin-off from this fundamental research is the realization that the production of carbonate crystals appears to occur in all marine bony fish. On a global scale this has been estimated to make a significant contribution to the marine-atmospheric carbon cycle, as the excreted calcium carbonate (which originates from the fishes own CO2 is dense and sinks to the sea floor, effectively removing CO2 from the cycle as it becomes trapped in deep ocean sediments.
